Are pigeons faster than the internet?

Pigeons, or as most of us like to call them, flying rats that poop all over the place. For several millennia now, human beings have been using pigeons to carry their messages across the world.

In Ancient Greece, pigeons were used to share Olympic results around the country. Reuters used pigeons to deliver stock market prices in 1850. To this day, countries use carrier pigeons to spy on their neighbours.

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What makes carrier pigeons so valuable is that they possess a homing ability. Which is to say no matter how far they fly – and they can fly thousands of miles – they can always find their way back home.

In fact, racing pigeons are a prized commodity today, sometimes going for as high as a couple of million dollars. And, in some specific cases, they’re even faster than the internet!

Pigeons vs internet speeds

This was put to test in 2009 when a homing pigeon called Winston delivered four gigabytes of data on a memory card from a location outside Durban to a coastal village called Hilltop faster than it took for the same data to be transferred on to a server.

Winston took under two hours whereas the web-assisted transfer took 3 hours and 8 minutes.

Even today, a pigeon can transport 2,000 photos or an hour-long video than the internet operating at 10 megabits per second.

If you’ve wondered who operates such sluggish internet? Welcome to Yemen, Syria, East Timor, an Afghanistan, all of them running the internet at speeds less than 2.70Mbps.

Putting the theory to test

More recently, Jeff Geerling, a content creator conducted a more thorough experiment. His theory was that pigeons could potentially outperform today’s fiber connections over shorter distances of around 800 kilometres.

Jeff didn’t race a pigeon, but his simulations indicated that the bird could even beat high speed internet. Geerling calculated a homing pigeon’s carrying capacity limits to three 1TB USB flash drives.

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He then flew with the drives on an airline from Saint Louis to Nova Scotia while simultaneously transferring 3TB of files between the two locations. The entire process of copying data from a laptop to the drives, flying to Nova Scotia, and copying them to a computer there took 6 hours and 53 minutes. In comparison, the gigabit transfer required 10 hours and 54 minutes.

Given the plane travelled at approximately 550mph and a pigeon’s average speed is around 80mph, Geerling estimated that the plane could beat a 3TB gigabit transfer over 8,000 kilometres, while the pigeon could achieve this within 800km.

So, in theory, it would be faster for you to use a pigeon to send up to 3TB of data within 800km than the Internet.

Of course, there is the matter of the fact that messenger pigeons can only fly between fixed points. So, your data can reach people only available at that point if you use a pigeon. But the internet would let you send copies of that same data to hundreds, even thousands of people at the same time at all different parts of the world.

Doing this with pigeons would require, well, a lot of pigeons.

But, really, even in these times of high-speed Wi-Fi, under the right circumstances and in theory, a pigeon could beat the internet.