Jeff Geerling is a software developer, author, and open-source contributor known for his expertise in infrastructure automation and Drupal development. Readers can learn about DevOps practices, Ansible automation, and web development with Drupal. With blog posts, tutorials, and open-source projects, Jeff Geerling shares  insights and best practices for building and managing web infrastructure.

Jeff Geerling

Jeff Geerling's video comparing the speed of a carrier pigeon to the internet was featured on the Italian quiz show L'Eredita on March 26, 2025. The show's question highlighted that a carrier pigeon can be faster than DSL, referencing Geerling's experiment with modified USB flash drives. The anecdote also touched on the capacity of carrier pigeons to carry weight and shared details about the video’s inspiration.

Never in a million years...

Of all places I thought I could’ve seen a tv show from my country this was definitely not where I was expecting it ahah

Of course a pigeon is faster than ADSL in Italy.

There are experiments like this earlier Greeling’s. See the Wikipedia entry on “IP over Avian Carriers”.

I can see a new AWS service, “Pigeon Transfer”. It’ll fit nicely between their S3 and Snowball service.
to be frank, a stripped down USB drive’s memory chip is the size of a grain of rice. so a pigeon can theoretically carry petabytes of data much faster then any service we have now :)

One time I had to get quite a lot of data from a datacenter in USA to Norway. Quick calculations showed that it would take probably 3 weeks to download it. I asked a person to go out, buy a bunch of hard disks, split the data onto them and ship it to me. Took 2-3 days.