Winston the pigeon puts Telkom to shame
September 9, 2009
Winston the pigeon is not only the most tech-savvy pigeon in the world, but he also carries himself -- and data bundles -- remarkably well.
And much faster than Telkom.
The 11-month-old homing pigeon took off from a call centre in Howick on Wednesday morning to deliver four gigabytes of data to The Unlimited company's office in Hillcrest, Durban, easily winning the race against an ADSL line.
"Winston is over the moon," The Unlimited IT head Kevin Rolfe told Sapa.
"He is happy to be back at the office and is now just chilling with his friends."
The flight took an hour and eight minutes.
"It was a little slower than what we were hoping for but it was overcast and rainy, with a lot of mist, that made travel conditions difficult for the little fellow," said Rolfe.
In total, it took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds for Winston to leave Howick with the data card strapped to his legs, to fly to Hillcrest, and to upload the data from the card onto the call centre system, said Rolfe.
By that time, the ADSL transmission of the same data size was around four percent complete.
"The bottom line for us right now, is that we would have had all the data here in two days' time [with ADSL]," said Rolfe.
The pigeon race idea started when a staffer, frustrated at the long transmission time of data, remarked it would be faster to send it with a pigeon.
"The exercise was really around how do we think out of the box... it gets people smiling and it gets people talking."
Winston, now officially employed by Rolfe, was chosen not for his speed, but for his unique features.
"The owner of the pigeon lives about five minutes' drive from the head office. We picked a bird out of his collection... he recommended another birth which he said to me was fast, but I picked Winston because he was a unique-looking bird with different colours and different markings," said Rolfe.
It costs The Unlimited about R1 a day to keep Winston in its care.
Will the company use the famous pigeon again?
"He is still going to have a lot of exploits... there is absolutely no problem in doing this again. The birds are on training runs all the time," said Rolfe.
Winston -- who boasted over 300 followers on Twitter -- himself tweeted several times about his trip; his comments including, "flying weather cloudy and cool, feeling good, no major problems to report... Hillcrest traffic is a worry".
ITWeb reported at 11.15am: "Winston has landed", not disappointing the 1,684 fans of the "Winston the Pigeon" Facebook group, one of them who described him as the "wings beneath my wings".
Some fans however lamented that their slow internet connections made it difficult to follow news of his flight online.
Strict rules applied for the race, as was stipulated on his website, pigeonrace2009.co.za, including, "no cats allowed" and "birdseed must not have any performance enhancing seeds within".
The Unlimited company operates call centres in KwaZulu-Natal and must transmit data, including voice recordings of calls, to its head office every day.
Rolfe said Telkom phoned him a few days ago to say that if he experienced any problems with its lines, he should log a complaint with the Telkom call centre.
"When there is a [major] problem we do it, but the problems are so ongoing that you will end up continuously logging faults," said Rolfe.
Telkom spokesman Pynee Chetty requested Sapa to send questions via email, saying he would respond later. - Sapa
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