Is a pigeon faster than the internet?
I tested this theory with a homing pigeon and even became a pigeon myself all to see
if my new fiber internet could be beat by an old communication network that's been
in use since 3000 BC.
Homing pigeons!
Even with fiber, my YouTube projects take hours to back up online.
This is going to sound crazy, but could pigeon-based backup be faster than the internet?
Someone once said, "Never underestimate the bandwidth
of a station wagon full of tapes
hurtling down the highway."
In my case, I'll have a pigeon and USB flash drives
instead of a station wagon and tape storage,
but you have to keep in mind: speed isn't everything.
Like, you can get hundreds of gallons of water
using a garden hose—eventually.
But if you want that water really fast,
you use big buckets.
(water splashing)
That's the difference between bandwidth,
how wide the pipe is (or how big your bucket is), and speed, how fast you can transfer little
bits of water.
That's exactly why Amazon rents out their Snowmobile.
This thing's a giant truck with petabytes of storage.
You copy your data to it, then they drive it back to their data center and upload your
data into the cloud.
It'd take years to transfer that much data over the internet.
But this video isn't about a truck.
It's about a pigeon.
Why a pigeon?
Well, now we get to the heart of it.
In 2009, a company in South Africa found that a carrier pigeon with a 4GB memory stick was
faster than the fastest ADSL service.
But that was over a decade ago.
Besides speculative work by the IEEE standards body, nobody's seriously tested this theory.
Until now.
I drove north to meet Greg, who owns St. Louis Doves.
The first question I asked? "What's the difference between a homing pigeon and a dove?"
After all, aren't all these white birds doves?
[Greg] All pigeons are rock doves, just like all dogs are canines.
So all the pigeons fall under the rock dove category,
but only certain ones know how to return home.
[Jeff] I also asked a bit about how homing pigeons
well, actually 'home'.
Do we know how they know how to get back here?
[Greg] No.
It's a God-given instinct, nobody knows.
They've been trying to figure that out forever.
I simply condition the birds.
I don't train them, I condition them
so they can go out to 50 miles.
[Jeff] And how do you do track the birds individually anyway?
[Greg] They all have bands and numbers.
I can show them to you, see one.
Let me get you a number here, 2015.
And these other bands were put on as mileage markers
and accomplishments, you know, so I knew the bright orange
was I was using a team of birds, that's a snap on band.
These other bands are put on when the birds are a week old.
[Jeff] So you can track them over time
and see how they're doing.
[Greg] Yeah, well, you know which ones are from which year.
[Jeff] Yeah.
[Greg] And then it also helps me to know which birds
are sitting on a nest.
And if they can go out that day
or they went out the day before,
I kind of have to keep track not to overfly.
[Jeff] Yeah.
[Greg] And then to keep one of the two parents at home
to take care of the babies when the other one's gone.
[Jeff] That's a good idea.
[Greg] Yeah.
[Jeff] With that out of the way,
I needed to see if one of his birds
could carry three SanDisk 1TB flash drives.
I bought these drives because they're actually
fast, tiny SSDs inside. They're expensive, but they're fast.
Speculation about birds and the internet conveniently leaves out the actual data transfer part.
Sure, I could slap a dozen microSD cards on a bird for more data per gram, but transferring
that data on and off the cards would take forever. These flash drives? They copy 250
megabytes per second all day long. And if I rip them out of their enclosures, each drive
is only about 5 grams. Fortunately, taking apart the drives only required one blood sacrifice.
I bundled them up, wrapped them up in an anti-static bag and taped that all up, and this whole
bundle, which should at least provide protection from bird poop or a hard landing, weighs about
18 grams. So I helped Greg strap it to one of his birds, one I'll call Gray, and, well,
we met our first challenge. Greg said it would be easier if the package were about half the
length. The traditional message holders for birds are only a few centimeters long, and
My little flash drive bundle was about twice that,
but in the end, we managed.
We drove about a mile away and we released Gray.
Just about a minute later, Gray got back to the coop,
but he was so scared of my GoPro he wouldn't go inside.
In fact, while we were gone,
none of the pigeons were brave enough to cross the GoPro.
So while I took it down,
Gray perched on a couple of roofs nearby
and he eventually found the courage to come back in.
Well, almost.
It took a friendly peck from one of his friends
before he had the confidence to return to the coop.
Once he did, Greg gave me back my flash drives,
proving a homing pigeon could, in fact,
carry three terabytes of high speed storage.
We also proved how majestic these birds are.
With such graceful flight,
it's no wonder these doves symbolize peace, freedom, and love.
So a pigeon can in fact carry at least
three terabytes of high speed storage, maybe even more.
And they can go pretty fast too,
over 120 kilometers per hour,
or about 80 miles per hour here in the US.
And I measured the time it takes to copy data
onto the drives and back off,
and in total that's about 150 minutes or 2 1/2 hours.
So we can make a baseline for data transfer speeds.
Pigeon-based file transfer is most efficient
over short distances,
but we'll have to measure internet transfer speeds
to see how long it would take my gigabit fiber to catch up.
But before we do that, there's more to this pigeon tale.
The pigeons endeared themselves to me while I was at Greg's.
In fact, that pigeon in the slow-mo even dropped off this feather as he flew over me.
Apparently, that's a sign of good luck.
So I thought, to give the pigeons a leg up over longer distance, I'd become one with
them.
I became a human pigeon, a Pi-jeff. Champion of the St. Louis homing pigeon legion!
I'll do my best to carry these 3 terabyte flash drives over a vast distance, all the
way from St. Louis to Nova Scotia in Canada, home of 45Drives.
At the same time, I'm going to copy 3TB over the internet to one of 45Drive's Stornator
servers.
Now, the internet copy has a serious advantage.
The moment I started copying the files, they started getting written to the server at 45
Drives.
For these flash drives, I had to copy the data to them at my house, then fly them up
to Canada, then I'll have to copy all the data back off again.
And even that wasn't without some issues.
I had to buy these special Thunderbolt hubs so I could write to all the drives as fast
as possible.
Most USB-C hubs like this one share one USB controller on all the ports, and that means
the drives are all slower if you try using them at the same time.
I have to do that, otherwise I'm cheating.
I can't just fill up one drive and count that speed for the other two.
No, we're copying three different 1TB files.
And to not bottleneck the file copies, I also had to use this 8TB NVMe drive with a high-speed
10 gigabit adapter because my Mac's built-in storage couldn't even hold 3TB.
The Internet copy isn't all roses and butterflies either.
I had to spend a couple days messing with SSH, scp, rsync, wormhole, and even a utility
I had never tried before, croc, just to get the fastest transfer speeds.
Even a gigabit connection isn't always a full gigabit.
But I got all that sorted and started the Internet copy, so it's time to start the
clock.
Jet planes cruise at speeds around 550 miles per hour, which is a nice improvement over
the 60-80 miles per hour of the homing pigeon.
Also, jet planes are a lot less likely to run into issues like getting eaten by a predator
or falling in love with another jet plane along the way.
I mean, a lot could happen on a 1500 mile journey to Canada.
During one of the plane transfers, I checked on the file copy progress, and I was getting
nervous.
Theoretically, an internet copy at a full gigabit should catch up to me around 2,000
miles of travel at jet speed, and the route I'm flying is almost 2,000 miles.
Accounting for takeoff and landing, it'll be down to the wire.
I'm still well ahead at my transfer, but remember, once I land in Nova Scotia, I still
have to copy the files back off the drives.
That's gonna eat up time.
But after meeting up with Wendell from Level1Techs and Techno Tim, we finally landed
and headed to 45Drives.
So I copied all the data back off the drives, and I made sure the hashes matched on the
Storinator and the drives, and it looks like the Pigeon copy took 6 hours and 53 minutes,
and the Internet copy took exactly 10 hours and 54 minutes.
So the pigeon wins!
Well, at least with a little help.
But extrapolating all the data out into this fancy chart, a homing pigeon could actually
win all by itself, if the race is limited to something like 500 miles.
With jet-assist, a pigeon could win out to about 5,000 miles.
And I never thought I'd see the day, but look at that!
I used some algebra.
Distance equals rate times time, giving me the Pigeon Data Transfer Equation.
For 3 terabytes of data, the transfer will take 150 minutes plus the distance traveled
in miles divided by the speed in miles per hour over 60.
And we could derive an equation for the 150 minutes, but my brain already hurts trying
to remember the formula for distance and time, so at least we got this fancy graph.
And if I really wanted to take this thing all the way to the limit, I could stuff my
bag full of even faster drives and beat the snot out of the internet.
Or I could race with a bird with even more lifting capacity like a crane. [heh, get it?]
But that's not what this video is about.
This video is about the humble pigeon.
And pigeon-based data transport isn't without risk.
I already mentioned predators and pigeons falling in love, but there's other problems
like discomfort.
With the drives I chose, poor Grey didn't look too happy.
Maybe the pigeon gets angry and never comes back.
You also have to make sure the route provides opportunities for rest, food, and water.
You couldn't just drop the bird in the Sahara or Antarctica.
But the biggest issue facing avian carriers is single point return.
Unlike the Internet, which routes around various points on the network, homing pigeons can
only "home in" on a single location.
There's really only one solution to that problem.
IP over Avian Carriers.
RFC 1149 has never really been tested at scale.
The only data for throughput and reliability comes from Bergen, Norway in 2001, and the
numbers weren't encouraging.
Ping times over an hour and over 55% packet loss.
But hey, maybe a topic for a future video.
Thanks to 45Drives for helping with travel and server space, and thanks to Tim, Wendell,
Jeff, and all the 45Drives staff, especially Brett, Dawson, Spencer, and Ashley, for helping
me film this video.
Until next time, I'm Jeff Geerling.