An amusing Israeli experiment demonstrates that carrier pigeons can achieve higher bandwidth than a typical ADSL line. My favorite quote:

Dr. Yossi Vardi, summed up by saying that even though the veteran technology proved its merits, it suffers from two main disadvantages: “One problem is that at night, this method’s bandwidth is zero, because carrier pigeons don’t fly at night. The second is that unlike pigeons, ADSL doesn’t [discharge] on your head.”

Unfortunately, despite the impressive bandwidth (1.42 Mbps for the fastest pigeon), pigeons are still completely useless for playing Unreal Tournament 2004 due to their extremely high latency. Still, perhaps I should keep a few birds around as a backup.