BT’s wholly exaggerated 8 Mb/s broadband service promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery – but across Britain it seems their web connection speed is markedly slower than a humble carrier pigeon.
A Smegmadale IT company pitted an 11-month-old homing pigeon with a 4 gigabyte memory stick taped to its leg against the pathetic broadband service from the country’s biggest internet supplier and their boasted ‘up to 8Mb/s’ download speed.
Polly the pigeon took three hours to carry the data 200-plus miles from London to manky Manchester – in the same time BT’s absurd Broadband service had sent 14% of the data.
The idea for the race came when a wag at the London-based Scumtech Innovations IT company plant complained about the speed of data transmission on BT’s Broadband – which promises up to 8 megabytes per second internet connection speed but provides – at best – less than 25% of what it not only boasts but also charges for.
The wag in question – Jacko McTwat – claimed it would be faster transmitting the data by carrier pigeon.
However BT informed a reporter from the Ripoffs Gazette that it was not responsible for the firm’s slow internet speeds – stating the promised 8 Mb/s only worked if you were in ‘range’ of a local telephone exchange – which critics claim translates as being next door – if then.
Scumtech’s McTwat told Fux News “We pride ourselves on being innovative here in all aspects of the communications industry, so decided to test my mocking statement in a real time demonstration.”
Scumtech set up a Polly the Pigeon website to publicize and monitor the race and brought in Ofcom adjudicators to ensure there were strict rules in place to ensure Polly – or BT – had no unfair advantage – with tens of thousands of techies and nerds following the run-up to the race on the Twitter and Facebook social networking sites.
The week prior to the race the UK’s High Street Shit-or-Bust bookies were giving 20-1 odds against BT even completing the race within the allotted four hour timespan – never mind actually winning the challenge.
On the ‘crack’ of the Ofcom umpire’s starting pistol Polly was released from one of Scumtech’s top floor windows and took to the wing – heading for their Manchester offices with a memory stick loaded with 4 gigabytes of data – while at the same instant Jacko McTwat hit the send button on his pc to transmit a 4 Gb cache of identical data to an Ofcom rep’ sat at a reciprocal pc in their Manchester offices.
While Polly had been screened for 24 hours prior to the race to be certain she wasn’t fed any amphetamine-laced ‘performance-enhancing seeds’ so too was BT’s broadband monitored by ‘Speedcheck’ from the start of the race to make sure it wasn’t artificially ‘boosted’ above its normal 0.35 Mb/s
The official Ofcom record shows that Polly took two hours and forty-eight minutes to fly between the London and Manchester offices – plus an added ten minutes to coax her inside and retrieve the memory stick due her being harassed by a prowling ginger minger tomcat – which unfortunately plummeted fifteen floors onto the pavement below after being twatted with a telephone directory.
Total time for Scumtech’s pigeon post e-data delivery onto hard drive : just under three hours – while BT Broadband had only managed to deliver 14% of the identical data package in the same time period.
University students across the UK who consider themselves cheated by BT’s dodgy 8 Mb/s Duckegg-band deal now plan to further humiliate the BT monopoly with similar contests by fielding a tortoise with a data stick taped to its shell – and a wheelchair-bound disabled pensioner carrying a CD of data in the cleft of a forked stick – against the BT service.