Pigeon faster than broadband in S. Africa

DURBAN, South Africa, Sept. 10 (UPI) -- A South African company says it found a carrier pigeon carried data faster than its Internet service.

The South African newspaper Beeld said staff at Unlimited IT in Durban, frustrated with the speed of its ADSL service provided by Telkom, set out to see if an 11-month-old pigeon named Winston could get a 4GB memory stick 60 miles away faster than it would take to have the same amount of data transmitted via broadband, the BBC reported Thursday.

It took Winston 1 hour, 8 minutes to fly from Unlimited IT's call center in Howick to its office in Durham. It took another hour to upload the information on the memory stick. In the same time, only 4 percent of the data had been sent through the ADSL connection.

Telkom said it was not responsible for the Durban firm's slow Internet speeds.

"Several recommendations have, in the past, been made to the customer but none of these have, to date, been accepted," Telkom's Troy Hector told the South African Press Association in an e-mail.

At last report, Winston was basking in the glory of his victory.