September 20, 2010, 1:01 PM — Carrier pigeons proved to be faster than rural broadband in a race held by business ISP, Timico.
The ISP held the race to see which method was fastest for transferring a 300MB video file. Ten Pigeons carrying USB keys containing the file were released from a farm in Beverley, Yorkshire at the same time as a download of the video-file was started.
When the pigeons reached Skegness, their destination 75 miles away, an hour and a quarter later, less than a quarter of the file had been downloaded. The download had all been re-set once in that time.
The stunt was designed to highlight that broadband in some locations in the UK is still "not fit for purpose".
"The farm we are using has a connection of around 100 to 200 Kbps (kilobits per second)," Tref Davies from Timico told the BBC.
"This is the UK. It should be well-connected but around a third of homes still can't get broadband."
A similar race took place in Durban, South Africa last year. A carrier pigeon completed a 96km journey within two hours. However, just four percent of a 4GB file had been downloaded in the same period.
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