The quality of internet services in South Africa suffer from poor bandwidth limitations. Frustrated with this problem, internet company Unlimited IT performed a stunt that showed it could transfer data much faster than Telcom’s (the contries leading ADSL provider) service.
Unlimited IT’s carrier pigeon backed data transfer reached speeds of 1 gigabyte per hour while transferring to a location 100km away. That’s a speed of about 270KB/second.
The idea to use homing pigeons to transfer information is not new. Ancient Egyptians were the first known civilization to be using carrier pigeons 3000 years go. The Roman’s used carrier pigeons to aid them in war over 2000 years ago. The use of carrier pigeons became most prominently known when their use became an important part of World War I and II.
On April fools day 1990, D. Waitzman of Cambridge Massachusetts described an internet protocol using carrier pigeons to transfer data in RFC 1149. This protocol later became known as IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC). On April fools 1999, Waitzman improved the protocol in RFC 2549. In 2001 however, a Linux User Group took the idea a little too seriously and implemented the protocol using pigeons to transfer data over a distance of 5km, before Unlimited IT of South Africa implemented this protocol as a marketing stunt.
