The other day we noted how some disgruntled Telkom DSL customers in South Africa planned to pit a carrier pigeon versus their sluggish DSL line in order to see which one could transmit 4GB of data faster. You'll be happy to know the BBC has been keeping up with the story (with video), and reports that the carrier pigeon delivered 4GB of data 60 miles in a little over an hour -- while the DSL line had only completed 4% of the same 4GB transfer. Telkom, the recovering South Africa monopoly telco, tells the BBC they "are not responsible for the firm's slow internet speeds."
And their new caps would be based on the max amount you could actually strap to a pigeon!! Though I bet they would go with the amount of 128MB sticks they could attach to the pigeon.
The pigeon does have a lot of latency, but he sends bigger packets
Also the ISP is the fault for slower speeds, after all it's their network and sending the file inside of the continent to a location nearby won't cause many slowdowns, unless of course the ISP is being cheap!
The whole pigeon net thing gives a ew meaning to "jumbo frames"
I wonder what the spectrum restrictions are in South Africa. If I remember correctly there's a lot of flatlands that could make for good wireless distribution and if they have 2.4 and 5.8 GHz regions available a wireless internet provider could come in and at least offer high-bandwidth domestic connectivity.
Most connections would have a hard time beating that pigeon
With my uverse 12 meg pipe I would be sitting right about the same time as the pigeon...assuming I was getting around a meg/sec. Nonetheless, if you only did 4% of that, that is pretty bad by any 'broadband' standards.
Reminds me of the old "play by turn" mail in games of the early 90's....
I cant believe tho in all seriousness that the ISP in question isn't taking any responsibility for this... Are there no laws in South Africa to regulate these types of things?
This wouldn't fly (pun intended ) in a place like the US... imagine if AT&T tried that... Oh wait... they already have with the iPhone & MMS/Tethering...
quote:Telkom said it could not be blamed for slow broadband services at the Durban-based company.
"Several recommendations have, in the past, been made to the customer but none of these have, to date, been accepted," Telkom's Troy Hector told South Africa's Sapa news agency in an e-mail.
Reminds me of the old "play by turn" mail in games of the early 90's....
I hope you mean the 1890's, since its been going on a lot longer than 20 years! My grandfather used to play chess via mail, right up until his death last year (see note below my avatar). I remember it would take him a few months to play each game, and he was totally fine with it.
Reminds me of the old "play by turn" mail in games of the early 90's....
I hope you mean the 1890's, since its been going on a lot longer than 20 years! My grandfather used to play chess via mail, right up until his death last year (see note below my avatar). I remember it would take him a few months to play each game, and he was totally fine with it.
That's awesome. What would the letter say? "Hey Bob, how are things? blah blah blah..." or simply "1.e4"?
Reminds me of the old "play by turn" mail in games of the early 90's....
I hope you mean the 1890's, since its been going on a lot longer than 20 years! My grandfather used to play chess via mail, right up until his death last year (see note below my avatar). I remember it would take him a few months to play each game, and he was totally fine with it.
That's awesome. What would the letter say? "Hey Bob, how are things? blah blah blah..." or simply "1.e4"?
If I recall there was a little (friendly) 'trash talking' with each move. Overall it was pretty humorous!
I cant believe tho in all seriousness that the ISP in question isn't taking any responsibility for this... Are there no laws in South Africa to regulate these types of things?
Yes, there are numerous government regulations. These are the full explanation for the abysmal service.
Why are we assuming they will have internet better than DSL with fractional T1 speeds for $120/mo? What else can you expect with a national telco monopoly located in a banana republic with extreme wealth inequality, urban decay, rolling blackouts, and large rural/1 story housing areas, and 70% of population has electricity (USA=%99.999?) and 50% has flush toilets? Next we will be hearing that SA National Telco is blocking VOIP, with govt permission.
Banana republic? I didn't know racism was allowed on this forum.
Haven't had rolling blackouts in SA for more than a year but more importantly, it's quite ironic that you use that to identify a third world country, when rolling blackouts are not uncommon in 1st world countries either. California have had several rolling blackouts during the last decade. 2000 and 2005 in particular. BBC headline news last week - 1st world UK will have rolling blackouts in the years to come since they can't keep up with elec demand either.
As for broadband: Telkom used to be the monopoly, but South Africa actually has a second national telco as well, Neotel, and all the major cellular providers are building their own national fiber networks.
For decades the only undersea cable linking South Africa with the rest of the world was the Telkom owned SAT3 cable, providing little intl bandwidth. However, this year SEACOM launched the second undersea cable (1.28Tbps) and there's a further 5 undersea cables being built: GLO-1, West Africa, 640Gbps, ready for operations, 2009 TEAMS, East and Southern Africa, 120Gbps Due September 2009 EASSy East and Southern Africa, 1Tbps Due June 2010 MainOne, West Africa, 1.92Tbps, due 2010 WACS, West and Southern Africa, 3.8Tbps, Due 2011
This drastic increase in international bandwidth capacity will obviously drive down the prices quite dramatically withing the next year or two. South Africa may be considered third world compared to the USA but they're miles ahead the rest of Africa.
As for broadband: Telkom used to be the monopoly, but South Africa actually has a second national telco as well, Neotel, and all the major cellular providers are building their own national fiber networks.
Neotel is a cellphone provider for residential purposes, FAIL!
Where is local loop unbundling? where is FTTH or rural copper? Except for its cellphone division, Neotel is as much a competitor to the ILEC as Level 3 is a competitor to Verizon or ATT in the US, except for its cellphone service Neotel won't do anything about Telkom's prices or be a real competitor.
It owns submarine cable capacity which is good. If I wanted to really create a useless ILEC competitor, I wouldn't give them the power legislatively to internationally connect out of SA forcing them to get access internationally through Telkom, at "free market" principles (extortion prices).
Social issues aside for a moment, they are the most modern and produce the highest GDP of any African nation. While they do contain a significant set of mineral assets which contributes to their trade of balance, they currently suffer from waste and graft in the govt. sector of which they are still trying to overcome.
Social issues inserted. Telkom, while a near monopoly suffers from some regulatory issues not to dissimilar from its power generation cousin Eskom. Several government mandates to provide unpaid services in certain areas produces a capital constraint as they can't raise rates to cover the cost of provision. Vodacom & MTN suffer no such constraints on wireless services and can fund long term infrastructure like fiber.
Personally I used Telkom DSL in the Cape and it performed quite well (2Mbps). This story, while amusing could happen in any country, 1st world or otherwise. A bad DSLAM port, water leaking onto a terminal, signal loss at the residence all could impact the quality. Telkom unresponsive? Hah! How many posts in this site describe unresponsive carriers?!! Enough said.
call me a cynic, but did anyone doubt that this wouldn't work? my wife's grandfather raised pigeons for racing. he was very into the sport and won several awards for having the "fastest bird". given the speed of flight, if you could put a big enough card on the pigeon in a way that it would not be lost in flight, of course you're going to win. had they not won, would you see them strapping an 8gig or 16gig flash drive to the pigeon just to get a victory?
According to the "we noted how" link, they pay just a little less than $6,000 a month for their connection... A rough guesstimate of the transfer speed of said connection was 40 - 50 KB/s, which is about 320 - 400 kbps...
I cannot fathom how an ISP can charge that insane amount for such a slow connection, unless they charge several hundred dollars a month for dial-up.
Hmm... If that's the case, then all of us in the 2nd world have it made. Even BT, for you blokes, and Telstra, for you Aussies, out there, sounds awesome in comparison! Ma Bell, FTW!!
If you close the windows is it considered a denial of service attack? also if you load the mem stick with MP3's then will RIAA be forced to screen every pigeon midflight?
If you remember the GTA 3 game. There is a radio station called chatterbox with Lazlow. There was a person that called in. I personally think he found one of these carrier pigeons. Listen to the first minute.