I try not to use links to articles behind a paywall, but there was an excellent article in the Washington Post by Janice Kai Chen that claims that Pigeons are still (sometimes) faster than your internet.

Using pigeons to communicate has a long history, back to ancient Greece where pigeons were used to spread word of the winners of the early Olympic games. Racing pigeons have been clocked at 40 miles per hour with a range of up to 400 miles.

Chen says that pigeons can still be faster for transmitting large data files in some circumstances. The three factors that determine if a pigeon can deliver data faster are the upload speed, distance, and the size of the data file being sent.

One place where pigeons can often be faster is in rural America, where slow upload speeds are common. The FCC is considering increasing the definition of broadband to include an upload data speeds of 20 Mbps, but much of rural America still has speeds that are far slower than this. It’s not hard to find homes where upload speeds are between 1 Mbps and 5 Mbps. At those slow speeds, a pigeon carrying a thumb drive is far faster for sending even relatively small data files across town.

Two examples used in the article demonstrate the point. For a home with a 3 Mbps upload speed, it would be much faster to use a pigeon to deliver a 3.4 gigabyte video file of “March of the Penguins” to somebody in the area rather than uploading it. But even with an upload speed of 30 Mbps, it’s more efficient to use a pigeon to send a 34 gigabyte collection of 35 episodes of Sesame Street.

I’m not sure I’ve seen a better analogy of how painful it can be to live on slow rural broadband. Picture a photographer in a rural area who can’t send a catalog of pictures or videos to a client – or even to the cloud. Earlier this year, I interviewed the owner of a rural weekly newspaper who had to drive fifty miles to deliver the galleys to the printer each week to be published.

But the pigeon analogy doesn’t only apply to slow Internet connections. Chen notes that earlier this year that YouTuber Jeff Geerling was able to  deliver a 3 terabyte file faster across town with a pigeon than what was possible with his symmetrical 1 gigabit fiber connection.

Big data center owners like Amazon and Google use trucks to transfer gigantic amounts of data between data centers. Amazon has a shipping container it calls AWS Snowmobile that can deliver 100 petabytes of data. A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, so that is 10,000 terabytes. Companies that want to send big archives of data regularly use the Amazon service.

The one drawback, of course, is that pigeons aren’t fully reliable. They may be lured by food or water, and sometimes just never show up. But is that really very different from a rural broadband customer who doesn’t know the upload speed they’ll get before they push the send button?