PSL

A South African IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom. And the bird won.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data. Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm's slow internet speeds. Also, McDonalds is not responsible for cooking the food you order.

The idea for the race came when a member of staff at Unlimited IT complained about the speed of data transmission on ADSL. He said it would be faster by carrier pigeon, and he was right.

"We renown ourselves on being innovative, so we decided to test that statement," Unlimited's spokesman said. No word on whether or not they were switching to an all-avian data service.

For the sake of data, a carrier pigeon can bear loads of up to 1.7 oz or about 48.2g. A 64GB SD card weighs 2.05g, which means that a pigeon could carry 23 64GB SD cards, or 1.472 terabytes. Even the best commercial ISP in the world would be hard-pressed to deliver 736GB/h between two customer DSL end-points. However, even the greatest pigeon on the world would be hard-pressed to deliver even one bit of information from Cape Town to New York.