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...pitted a homing pigeon carrying 4GB of data on a USB stick against its broadband connection...

Instantly double throughput with an 8GB USB stick.

I have a 32GB USB stick somewhere, that's an 8-fold throughput increase. I'm guessing my 500GB portable hard drive would be a bit too heavy for a pigeon . . . I suppose you could do packet bursting by strapping the hard drive to several pigeons.

Half of the time was spent getting the data from the stick onto the computer, while only half was spent with the pigeon flying.

So, it will go up, but with quickly diminishing returns.

> However, he admits the plan is not without its difficulties: "There are other problems, of course. Winston is vulnerable to the weather and predators such as hawks. Obviously he will have to take his chances but we're confident this system can work for us,' says Rolfe.

They might need to retransmit once or twice a month too . . .

Redundant pigeons would reduce the data loss, although maintenance costs would rise.

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