According to an Internet legend, a carrier pigeon can deliver a unit of data from point A to point B faster than a gigabit Internet connection. Sound silly? This is the proof.
The evolution of data transmission technologies always brings with it a great deal of marketing gimmicks, advertisements and campaigns built around specific devices which reinforce our awareness that the new is always better and faster and we need it. The rapid development of internet access and broadband connections has now developed to such an extent that many people are completely addicted to the internet, and if they encounter a small hurdle, they immediately become tense.
The Gigabit era has been around for quite some time in our country, although there are still a lot of areas where the upload and download values are very low compared to today’s needs. Jeff Girling certainly has no such problem, but he believes gigabit bandwidth can’t be fast enough in all cases.
Instead of fighting numbers, service providers and optical cables, he opted for a more interesting comparison. I caught a homing pigeon and sent it on its way with 3 terabytes of data.
At first, the whole experience seems like a huge waste of time, but looking beyond the question posed, the YouTuber really “flew” with a long-standing curiosity, whether physical data traffic could be faster than an Internet connection.
Girling chose three SanDisk Extreme Pro flash drives for the experiment, with a total capacity of 3TB. Incidentally, the storage devices themselves are among the fastest, capable of writing and reading at nearly 400MB per second. Additionally, it is useful to add the 100-125 MB/s data download typical for Gigabit Internet, which in this experiment averaged 75 MB/s.
The pigeon selected for the experiment made the one-mile journey to the finish line using the three data storage devices in one minute, plus of course copying the data stored on the flash drives to the physical storage device at the destination. Based on the estimate of the pigeon’s flight speed and internet connection performance, at a distance of about 500 miles, the bird would be faster than uploading online. Of course, the exact time depends on the distance the carrier pigeon travels, but it takes 11 hours to transfer 3 terabytes of data over the Internet.
It’s worth watching the 10-minute long video, because it really does seem like the pigeon is really the winner at the moment, although given the data security aspects, it’s not so certain that our feathered friend is the best choice.
