TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (236)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of BBC News (from Thursday, September 10; link good at time of posting):

Broadband promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery - but in South Africa it seems the web is still no faster than a humble pigeon.

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

....

According to Winston's website there were strict rules in place to ensure he had no unfair advantage.

They included "no cats allowed" and "birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within".

The firm said Winston took one hour and eight minutes to fly between the offices, and the data took another hour to upload on to their system.

....

Hundreds of South Africans followed the race on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.

....

Meanwhile Telkom said it could not be blamed for slow broadband services at the Durban-based company.

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