Slow internet speeds? It might be faster to use a pigeon.

Internet speeds have come a long way since the days of the dial-up modem, but sometimes you can’t beat the millennia-old method of carrier pigeon. At certain data volumes and distances, the pigeon is a quicker option for large swaths of rural America, where internet speeds can lag far behind the national average. Whether a pigeon can best the internet depends on three things: internet speed (check your own here), distance and data. It doesn’t make a difference online whether you’re sending a file across town to your neighbor or best friend across the country. It’s the size of data being sent that slows the internet down. The longer the journey, the bigger the data needs to be for the bird to out-fly broadband. Although many Americans have high-speed internet, in rural areas the internet can be spotty and slow. In 2020, nearly 1 in 5 rural residents lacked access to download speeds of at least 25 megabits per second (or Mbps) and upload speeds above 3Mbps, the definition for high-speed broadband set by the Federal Communications Commission in 2015.