Bird moves faster than South Africa’s broadband system

In an embarrassing incident for South Africa’s leading ISP provider, workers at a local IT company have raced a carrier pigeon against the country’s broadband network – and the pigeon won.

The 11-month old bird, which the employees named Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly 80km from the company’s offices in Pietermaritzburg to Durban, with a data card strapped to its leg.

But by the time it arrived, just 4% of the data it carried had been transferred across the same route by Telkom’s broadband infrastructure. No information on the size of the cards’ data was available.

The employees of Unlimited IT, which runs 11 call centres across the country, performed the stunt to express their frustration with the country’s widely criticised internet speed, poor connectivity and high cost.

South Africa plans to install a 17,000km underwater fiber optic cable to improve its broadband speed before it hosts the soccer World Cup in 2010.