5 GEE-GEE!
How to beat slow internet ... send your data by horse
IT’s a victory for the old-fashioned way of doing things.
A horse delivered a package of pictures quicker than broadband internet by over three hours.
Photographer Klaus-Peter Kappest had long been unhappy with the sluggish pace of uploads at his home in the sauerland, a hilly rural area in western Germany.
It would often take several hours to send a collection of images to his customers given his 1.5Mbps broadband speed – around a tenth of that in most homes in the UK.
Mr Kappest, 52, was complaining to his colleagues at a local magazine when the editor joked that he would be better off delivering his pictures by horse.
He said: ‘That was the most reliable communications technology in the Middle Ages. And my editor said, “Well let’s do it then, let’s see which is truly faster”.’
The photographer enlisted teenager Jakob schuette, a rider who lives in his village, Oberkirchen. He put 800 photos on to a DVD, stuffed it into a satchel and dispatched Jakob and his steed Favo to a printer’s office six miles away.
At the same time he uploaded the same date to a popular filesharing service and set a timer.
The file transfer took five hours, while Favo took an hour and 44 minutes. Mr Kappest told The Times: ‘It turned out that the messenger on horseback had not only delivered the data faster, but the horse was already back in its stable, groomed, fed and released on to the pasture before the data was finally uploaded.’
Favo may face a closer race in future – the local internet provider has promised to install fibre-optic broadband in the village after being embarrassed by the story.