Bad news: your super-fast gigabit fiber optic network is no match for… a pigeon with a flash drive on it?
Although we stopped using homing pigeons nearly 100 years ago, a YouTuber discovered that these birds transfer 3TB of data faster – at distances of up to 500 miles – than today’s birds. gigabit broadband connections.
Jeff Geerling, who runs a popular YouTube channel, connected three full 1TB SanDisk Extreme PRO flash drives to a carrier pigeon and sent it to its destination, a Canadian data center.
Equipped with SSDs, these are among the best flash drives available today. Western Digital claims that they can achieve data transfer rates of up to 420 MB/s for reading and 380 MB/s for writing.
While ISPs tend to market full-fiber Internet connections as offering gigabit speeds — which should translate into data transfer rates of at least 125 MB/s — Geerling actually came in at about 75 MB/s.
It took a minute for the bird to reach its destination, which was a mile away. Geerling added that to the time it took to transfer the data from the flash drives to local storage, and compared this total figure to the time it takes to transfer the 3TB of data over an internet connection.
He found that transferring this amount of data using a pigeon, up to about 500 miles—which humanity has been doing since 3000 B.C.—would be faster than relying on the gigabit internet speeds we have today. The time it takes depends on the distance the pigeon would have to travel, while it took 10 hours and 54 minutes to transfer the data over the internet.
The YouTuber wanted to replicate a similar experiment from 2009, in which a South African company raced a pigeon with a 4GB memory disk with the fastest ADSL service, provided by the ISP Telkom. They transferred the data per pigeon in one hour and eight minutes, while the ADSL service only managed to complete 4% of the upload. They tested this over a distance of 60 miles.
Today’s best broadband packages may not be able to compete with physically moving data from one location to another. But ISPs and network companies are constantly upgrading, enabling speeds in the 10Gbps camp – or even 100Gbps.