A Pigeon Vs Dial Up – The Race To Deliver Fastest

I gave a couple of talks to some business delegates at a seminar in the beautiful coastal town of Byron Bay this morning.

One of the talks was about marketing and I briefly mentioned generating media coverage for your business. My point being that if you do something newsworthy then you stand the best chance of gaining some coverage.

During the morning tea break a guy called Peter Lewis – he’s the Deputy Mayor of Kyogle – came up and had a chat about how he last attracted excellent media coverage for his town in regard to its poor telecom services – and it’s a story worth repeating.

Here’s The Media Release From The Pigeon Vs Telstra Race

The Pigeon Has Landed

Date: 23 November 2003

Hermes the pigeon took on Telstra dial up and won.

With the task of sending 51 photos from Kyogle to Casino (32 km), Peter Lewis, Manager of the CTC Kyogle, knew that the dial up connection that they currently have would take between 2 1/2 and five hours to send.

“There has to be something better. Even a homing pigeon would go better than that.” said Mr Lewis.

No bets were taken as it would have beeen an unfair advantage to the pigeon.

Hermes in his last start from Rockhampton to Casino did it in 10 hrs averaging seventy kilometres an hour. Thats seriously fast.

How fast was a dial up and what was the point of the race?

Well for most home user’s dial up and the new ISDN service is just fine but for business and heavy user’s of the internet it is just too slow. If Telstra had installed ADSL in Kyogle, as Lismore and Casino have Hermes would not have stood a chance.

The 64mg of data would have been sent in under 3 minutes.

Telstra says that Kyogle residents have to prove the case for having ADSL put on in Kyogle, so here is your chance to tell them. Phone Telstra on 131282 and then choose option 2 sales. Then option 2 again put in an expression of interest.

In a postscript to the race, Hermes the pigeon was not only carrying a 64mg of data but also an egg which she laid at 7pm the next day.

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Now that’s smart thinking to draw attention to your issue and a great example of newsworthy stories generating good publicity.