By now, I'm sure you've heard of the race between Winston the messenger pigeon and Telkom, to see who will deliver 4G of data quicker. I'm only re-writing about because I just learned about it and want to make sure everybody else who hasn't (that one other dude in the remote jungles of Brazil) can read about it here.

A certain IT worker at a certain company was miffed about the speed - or lack of it - of his company's internet connection. While talking it over with some other coworkers and some beers, they decided a race was in order, to see if a carrier pigeon would beat the telecom in sending 4G of data to another building at the same company.

Here's a quote about how the race went down on Wednesday:

The 11-month-old homing pigeon took off from
a call centre in Howick on Wednesday morning to deliver four gigabytes
of data to The Unlimited company's office in Hillcrest, Durban, easily
winning the race against an ADSL line.

"Winston is over the moon," The Unlimited IT head Kevin Rolfe said.

"He is happy to be back at the office and is now just chilling with his friends."

The flight took an hour and eight minutes.

"It was a little slower than what we were hoping for but it was
overcast and rainy, with a lot of mist, that made travel conditions
difficult for the little fellow," said Rolfe.

In total, it took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds for Winston to
leave Howick with the data card strapped to his legs, to fly to
Hillcrest, and to upload the data from the card onto the call centre
system, said Rolfe.

By that time, the ADSL transmission of the same data size was around four percent complete.

"The bottom line for us right now, is that we would have had all the data here in two days' time [with ADSL]," said Rolfe.

Here's a link to the whole article and here's Winston's (the pigeon) facebook page.

In a response, the telecom company said something to the effect that well, you could said a huge data transfer via jet engine and get it to the destination sometimes faster than it's ADSL. This is true, and one may not fault the telecom if Winston the Pigeon actually had a jet engine strapped to his back.