IP over Avian Carriers

IP over Avian Carriers was initially described in RFC 1149 issued by the Internet Engineering Task Force, written by David Waitzman, and released on April 1, 1990.

[6] Known risks to the protocol include: 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 (48 km) distance, a single pigeon may be able to carry tens of gigabytes of data in around an hour, which on an average bandwidth basis compared very favorably to early ADSL standards, even when accounting for lost drives.

[8] Since the developers used flash memory instead of paper notes as specified by RFC 2549, the experiment was widely criticized as an example in which an optimized implementation breaks an official standard.

The experiment had the team transfer a 700 MB file via three delivery methods to determine which was the fastest: a carrier pigeon with a microSD card, a car carrying a USB stick, and a Telstra (Australia's largest telecom provider) ADSL line.

[13] A similar pigeon race was conducted in September 2010 by tech blogger (trefor.net) and ISP Timico CTO Trefor Davies with farmer Michelle Brumfield in rural Yorkshire, England: delivering a five-minute video to a BBC correspondent 75 miles away in Skegness.