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Background: 近日一家金融服務公司說該國的互聯網速度太慢遠比不上信鴿的速度。這家公司舉辦了一個別開生面地比賽以證明其觀點。
【文本】
In this digital age the one thing that drives people crazy is the internet running slow.
After constant moans from their colleagues about the snail's pace of sending data between offices, the IT experts at the South African financial services firm Unlimited wondered if it would be quicker using a pigeon.
That's when they enlisted the help of Winston, the racing pigeon.
They tied a computer memory card to Winston's leg and launched him on an 80-km journey between offices in Durban and Pietermaritzburg. Unlimited's head of IT, Kevin Rolfe, says at the same time a button was pressed to send the same data online:
"When the chip was attached to Winton's leg and taken outside for release the entire office was standing there cheering and egging Winston and his colleagues on.
The release of it was quite spectacular, you had these birds flying off and at the same time as that was happening the transfer was in hand and heading up the line via the traditional ADSL."
It usually takes Unlimited six hours to send four gigabytes of data online from Durban to Pietermaritzburg.
The racing pigeon did it in about an hour.
The company that operates South Africa's network of internet lines, Telkom, has told the BBC that the race was unfair because Unlimited was using standard broadband lines and not its high speed network.
Unlimited will continue to transfer data over the internet, but Winston and his flying colleagues are still likely to be used at least once a week.
