In 1990, engineers wrote an internet standard for carrier pigeons

According to IP over Avian Carriers, the internet's standards body once published a straight-faced proposal "to carry Internet Protocol (IP) traffic by birds such as homing pigeons." RFC 1149, written by David Waitzman and released on April 1, 1990, was one of several April Fools' Day standards. "IPoAC has been successfully implemented, but for only nine packets of data, with a packet loss ratio of 55% (due to operator error)," and response times up to 100 minutes. "Thus, this technology suffers from extremely high latency."

A follow-up, RFC 2549, cataloged the risks with a straight face: "Unintentional encapsulation in hawks has been known to occur, with decapsulation being messy and the packets mangled." In 2001, a Norwegian Linux group actually flew nine ping packets about five kilometers by pigeon and got four responses back.

In 2009, a South African company raced a pigeon carrying a memory card against a Telkom broadband line. The pigeon won: "At the time of Winston's victory, the ADSL transfer was just under 4% complete."

Previously:

• CPIP (Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol)
• Pigeons are faster than DSL