DwightDeGroff.com - Tech that Matters

Some practical advice from Africa as reported by the BBC – when faced with slow broadband speeds and a large file to transfer… try a carrier pigeon!

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country’s biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles – in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

The experiment is a bit contrived. If I want to transfer 4 TB worth of photos from one computer upstairs to a photo printing store I shouldn’t try to upload them online and should instead just take a portable hard drive to the store. The moral of the story is a good one: if you need to transfer a lot of data, instead of just firing up your FTP client, think about some alternative methods for transferring the data. We could all save ourselves some grief if we learned this lesson from Winston.

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