Pigeon Broadband

I enjoyed this piece from South Africa:

A pigeon in South Africa has proved that ADSL from the country's biggest web firm Telkom is not faster than a carrier pigeon. An IT firm in Durban decided to race the pigeon against uploading data over ADSL from the company's call centre in Howick to it's office in Durban. Winston, the pigeon carried a 4GB microSD memory card between the sites which are approximately 60 km apart. To ensure the test was fair, rules of the test included "no cats allowed" and "birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within".

The results of the test showed that Winston completed the transfer in 2hrs 6 minutes and 57 seconds (from uploading data on the card to completion of download from the card) giving a transfer rate of 4.2 Mbps (megabits per second). The ADSL transfer was only 4% complete when the pigeon won the race.

Telkom, the ADSL provider said it wasn't to blame for the slow broadband speeds.