> Rafting photographers already use pigeons as a sneakernet to transport digital photos on flash media from the camera to the tour operator.[7] Over a 30-mile distance, a single pigeon may be able to carry tens of gigabytes of data in around an hour, which on an average bandwidth basis compares very favorably to current ADSL standards, even when accounting for lost drives.
> Inspired by RFC 2549, on 9 September 2009, the marketing team of The Unlimited, a regional company in South Africa, decided to host a tongue-in-cheek "Pigeon Race" between their pet pigeon "Winston" and local telecom company Telkom SA. The race was to send 4 gigabytes of data from Howick to Hillcrest, approximately 60 km apart. The pigeon carried a microSD card and competed against a Telkom ADSL line. Winston beat the data transfer over Telkom's ADSL line, with a total time of two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds from uploading data on the microSD card to completion of download from card. At the time of Winston's victory, the ADSL transfer was just under 4% complete.
See also the famous quote about the bandwidth of a pickup truck filled with magnetic tape... The modern equivalent would be AWS Snowmobile [0] which is described as follows:
> Each Snowmobile is a secured data truck with up to 100PB storage capacity that can be dispatched to your site and connected directly to your network backbone to perform high-speed data migration
A Wired article [1] calculated the San Francisco to New York bandwidth of a full Snowmobile as just under 5 Tbps which is pretty damn impressive, although the offload network connection on the truck is (only) a 1 Tbps connection. And it gets quite pricey, a fully loaded Snowmobile is USD 500K per month, plus the 350 kW of electricity it needs.
According to the FAQ, if you need more bandwidth, you can operate the Snowmobile trucks in parallel to get multi Exabyte scale data transfers, but I have difficulty imagining any of the use cases that would require that as a solution...?!?
> Inspired by RFC 2549, on 9 September 2009, the marketing team of The Unlimited, a regional company in South Africa, decided to host a tongue-in-cheek "Pigeon Race" between their pet pigeon "Winston" and local telecom company Telkom SA. The race was to send 4 gigabytes of data from Howick to Hillcrest, approximately 60 km apart. The pigeon carried a microSD card and competed against a Telkom ADSL line. Winston beat the data transfer over Telkom's ADSL line, with a total time of two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds from uploading data on the microSD card to completion of download from card. At the time of Winston's victory, the ADSL transfer was just under 4% complete.