Pigeon Beats Broadband in South African Contest

An IT company in South Africa has dramatically shown the lamentable condition of the country’s telecommunication infrastructure by challenging the near-monopoly telephone line owner, Telkom, to a race with a pigeon. The result says a great deal.

The company, Unlimited IT, decided it would send a pigeon from the coastal KwaZulu-Natal town of Howick to its headquarters in the port city of Durban, the BBC reported. An employee had complained of the slow data transmission of his ADSL line and said it would be faster by carrier pigeon.

Unlimited’s Kevin Rolfe told a national newspaper: "We renown ourselves on being innovative, so we decided to test that statement."

The pigeon was loaded with a four gigabyte memory stick and sent to Durban. Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 100 kilometres (60 miles). The ADSL line had only sent four percent of the data in the time.

Telkom said it was not at fault, as it had made several recommendations to the firm, all of which had been ignored.

A new fiber optic cable, Seagate, has been connected for South African users, but Telkom’s near monopoly of all landline telephone services means that the new cable will make little difference to most South African Internet users.

Another problem is that Telkom uses copper cabling, which is not only much slower than fiber optics, but is also attractive to thieves. Copper cable theft is big business in South Africa’s large criminal community. With the South African government holding a stake in Telkom, and Communist China recently buying into it in a big way, the idea that the people come first appears to be a distant one.

Only the future will tell whether South Africa’s Internet infrastructure will catch up with the rest of the developed and developing world.

Then again, there is always the chance of a homing-pigeon network to look forward to!