One of those nice little stories that does the rounds came up this week— apparently a South African Pigeon is faster than South African broadband. In short, a pigeon with a 4 gigabyte memory card attached to it's foot travelled 60 miles in the time it took to transfer 4% of the data across the broadband network.

A Virgin Media PR rep was quick to pick up on it, and gave Techradar a little story of their own on the back of it;

"On our service, that 4GB would take under 11 minutes to transfer," the Virgin Media rep proudly informed [TechRadar]. "For a pigeon to beat us, it would have to fly at nearly 330mph." He was even kind enough to send us his calculations, which were as follows: (4 GB) / (50 (megabits per second)) = 10.9226667 minutes (60 miles) / (10.9226667 minutes) = 147.339843 m / s 147.339843 (meters per second) = 329.589842 miles per hour

Sounds impressive… But is it true?

Well, one commenter (jaffacake) pointed out that;

Of course, in reality, the company was SENDING the file not receiving it. Even on Virgin 50meg, the upload speeds are pitiful - far from 50meg, in fact 1.5meg. So, let's correct the maths above... 329.589842 miles per hour /50 * 1.5 = 9.88769526 miles per hour. I'll have 50quid on the pigeon to win.

Well, a while ago I wrote about why you should trust the amateurs when it comes to these nerdy calculations. And I said back then that "I'll probably talk about the implications of "next generation broadband" from a user/consumer point of view elsewhere later (specifically, a user/consumer who is angry with Virgin Media for aggressively throttling their connection to dial-up speeds)", and it occurs to me that I never did really get that out of my system...

So if I were to do the same 4Gb data transfer with my "Large" (10Mb) connection, assuming that everything went at it's absolute fastest (for the sake of convenience…), I would only be seeing an upload speed of 512k (a twentieth of my upload speed, and a tiny percentage of the "50 meg broadband".)

Worse still, looking at Virgin's traffic management policy, in the evening (3pm-8pm), the upstream connection is throttled- after 800MB, the speed is cut by 75%. So if I were to try it in the evening (3pm-8pm- and as you'll see from the figures, I wouldn't have a lot of choice), after 800MB it's cut by 75% for 5 hours.

So, plugging the numbers into the very handy Convert iPhone application, I see that I'd be uploading;

800MB at 512kb/s in 12800s (3.55 hours) 281.25 MB at 128kb/s in 18000s (while my connection is throttled for 5 hours) Then the remaining 2.944GB at 512kb/s in 48236s (13.4 hours)

So, it would take a total of just under 22 hours. Which, travelling 60 miles, would mean an equivalent speed of 2.73 miles per hour.

Given that, according to Wikipedia, the average human walking speed is about 3 miles an hour, that means I could walk the 60 miles myself, spend an hour transferring it from the USB stick, and still have an hour to rest before the upload had finished. (By which point, after a 60 mile walk, I would probably need it…)

So maybe the sneakernet will be around for a while longer yet...

But remember that the time taken is theoretically the same over any distance. If I were transferring those 4 gigabytes to someone else on my road, it would still be a 22 hour transfer. This is why I think that text is still the really interesting application on the web— and will remain so for quite some time. Sure, we can have fancy graphics in Flash and other rich media, HD video and so on, but the fact is that I can communicate almost instantly on a mobile connection with someone anywhere in the world through platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Wordpress. What's more, I can tell them what I saw, what I thought or what I felt- not just give them a look at what a shaky hand held camera managed to catch in poor lighting. For me, real-time communication on a mobile phone is much more interesting than downloading home made videos from something that happened days or weeks ago.

So if you find yourself wanting to send some home video to someone less than 60 miles away, you might want to think twice about using your super fast broadband. Better yet— tell them what you saw, rather than what the camera saw.

Why not write it and post it to a blog and share that with the world instead of uploading a video to YouTube? It might even be quicker…