Winston the pigeon beats the Internet!

Just like Harry Potter gets deliveries by owl, in the past the post has been delivered by animals. But who would have imagined that animal deliveries could be faster than the Internet?!

Now, an IT company in South Africa has proved that this can sometimes be true. The company Unlimited IT in the city of Durban was so unhappy at the speed of their broadband connection, that they claimed a carrier pigeon could be quicker. So they decided to test their theory! "We renown ourselves on being innovative, so we decided to test that statement," Keven Rolfe of Unlimited IT told the Beeld newspaper.

Rolfe and his colleagues gave the pigeon, called Winston, a 4GB memory stick to transport 60 miles between two of their offices, and at the same time they started to transfer the same data over the Internet. Winston took one hour and eight minutes to deliver the memory stick - and beat the Internet transfer! In fact, by that time they had only transfered 4 per cent of the data.

Unlimited IT are hoping the stunt will demonstrate to their Internet Service Provider (ISP) how slow their connection is. But the ISP Telkom is not amused. "Several recommendations have, in the past, been made to the customer but none of these have been accepted," said Telkom's Troy Hector.

But for everyone else, it was a bit of fun. Thousands of South Africans followed Winston's journey on Facebook and Twitter.

See Winston on YouTube!