Reliable Embedded Systems

You have probably read the April Fool's Day RFC 1149 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers) (available at http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149.txt).

You may have read http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ which is about an implementation of it. Maybe they should try it in South Africa. They appear to have the hardware. 

A South African information technology company on Wednesday proved it was  faster for them to transmit data with a carrier pigeon than to send it using Telkom, the country's leading [I]nternet service provider. Internet  speed and connectivity in South Africa are poor because of a bandwidth shortage. The 11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80 km from Unlimited IT's offices near Pietermaritzburg  to the coastal city of Durban with a data card strapped to his leg. In that time, just two per cent of the data was sent over the Internet." [Source: Pigeon Transfers Data Faster Than Internet Provider (Reuters), Kamloops This Week Daily (Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada), 2009-09-11 issue, p. 4]

The joke used to be about the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magtapes, and now, the hardware has been miniaturised to pigeon-size. I am amazed at he advances in computer technology.

[Also noted by Matthew Kruk. PGN]
http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/mp/6016150/pigeon-transfers-data-faster-than-south-africa-telkom/

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