A wonderful example of the completely aligned business: Frustrated by the poor data transfer speeds between their call centres in South Africa, a wonderfully innovative company called The Unlimited have resolved their technical issues and hired the talents of an avian data maestro called Winston. And at a cost of a little less than 8p per day the idea has real merit.

Yesterday morning, 9th of September, 11-month old Winston, a homing pigeon, took off from a call centre in Howick, South Africa with a 4GB datacard strapped to his little leg. In precisely two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds the data had been  transferred onto the card in Howick, attached to Air Winston, flown the 70kms to Hillcrest and been transported by car from his coop to the site systems and uploaded.

Going head to head with this, and between the same points, an upload of the identical data on an ADSL line had only achieved a four per cent completion in the same time. Winston had, very sportingly, even given the ADSL transfer a head start of some 26 minutes while he stretched his wings in a gentle warm up as the data was loaded ready for take off. In an hour and eight minutes he was home... a bit of a 'coop de grace' !

The South African data carrier, Telcom, was unavailable for comment to representatives of The Unlimited, though a promise was made to that a reply would be forthcoming  … at some point …sometime … maybe … send us an email….

Perhaps I need to consider something similar for my BT connection at home. Wonder if I can catch and train a 40GB pheasant.