photo caption: backlit poster display, Albany International Airport, Albany, NY
In urban areas, broadband clearly wins, but rural areas are a different story
from: BBC World via El Nuevo Dia
Broadband is the most modern of communication means, while carrier pigeons date to Roman times.
A race between the two highlighted the low speeds of rural broadband in the UK; the pigeon won. Ten USB-key-laden pigeons were released from a farm at the same time the upload of a five-minute video file was begun. An hour and a quarter later, the pigeons had reached their destination in Skegness 120km away, while only 24% of the 300MB file had uploaded. Campaigners say the stunt was being carried out to illustrate that broadband in some parts of the UK is still "not fit for purpose". It is not the first time that such a race has taken place. Last year a similar experiment in Durban, South Africa saw Winston-the-Pigeon take two hours to finish a 96km journey. In the same time just 4% of a 4GB file had downloaded. "The farm we are using has a connection of around 100 to 200 Kbps (kilobits per second)," Tref Davies, the stunt's organiser, told BBC News on Thursday morning. "Kids need to do school work and farmers have to submit online forms but the connection is not fit for purpose." "This is the UK. It should be well-connected but around a third of homes still can't get broadband," Davies said. [ed. note: 75Grand/Sur posts from a rural location in Puerto Rico using a dialup connection to the internet at speeds around 300-500 Kbps. Lucky we're not a school kid, or a farmer.] J.Galligan 75GRAND/SUR Santa Olaya, PR
