Welcome to the Avian Network
When David Waitzman published the April Fools' Day RFC, RFC 1149 ('A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers') in 1990, and later the improved RFC 2549 ('IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service'), I doubt if he would have imagined whether someone would actually implement the protocol. From a CNET article that appeared in 2001, I learnt that someone had actually tried it out, and came to the conclusion that 'taking an hour and 42 minutes to transfer a 64-byte packet of information makes the pigeon network about 5 trillion times slower than today's cutting-edge 40 Gigabit-per-second optical fiber networks'. Recent improvements in carrier pigeon technology, along with sloppiness on the part of traditional Internet Service Providers, could potentially make the above statement obsolete.
IP over Avian Carriers researchers have overcome the data rate bottleneck by replacing rolled paper on which data was printed with USB memory devices, and in two instances in the last two months, demonstrated a much higher data rate than that achieved by ADSL. In September of this year, Winston the Pigeon flew from Howick to Durban in South Africa - a distance of about 80km - with a 4GB USB memory device, clocking about 2 hours for the entire data transfer (including copying to a PC at the receiving end) - in the same time the ISP Telkom's ADSL network managed to move only about 4% of the data.
Last month, a pigeon in Australia carried 700MB of data from Tarana to Prospect in New South Wales - a distance of about 132km - in about 1 hour 5 minutes (excluding copying of the data). The ISP Telstra's internet connection timed out, leaving the transfer incomplete. It is reported that when the data transfer was initiated, the estimated time for completion was pegged at 4 to 9 hours.
As a proto-astronomer (and otherwise), it is highly disturbing to me that South Africa and Australia are facing network issues. The South African Large Telescope (SALT), an 11m optical telescope, is about 18 km from the nearest fibre optic cable, forcing astronomers to carry data by road. South Africa and Australia also happen to be the prime candidates for the upcoming Square Kilometre Array - the largest radio telescope ever built. The miserable performance of Internet Service Providers in these countries leads to questions about their governments' commitment to connectivity.
Anyway, it looks like humanity is coming full circle as far as communication is concerned. With due apologies to Cisco, welcome to a network where anything is possible. Welcome to the avian network.
