In the early days of the internet, the future still felt bright and weird. The “net” was for surfing, tinkering, and experimenting with new ways to share.
That spirit gave us one of the most unusual official standards ever written: IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC) - data by birds. It is an official IETF RFC that reimagined communication by using pigeons as packet carriers.
The opportunity was enourmous. Birds could directionally deliver large payloads, and even use flock intelligence to avoid predatory “hacker” birds with their on-board neural engines and self-driving capabilities, features that at the time were only in sci-fi.
But the tech also faced nature’s constraints: weather, coverage gaps, illness, and the occasional design flaws in carrier selection.
Still, IPoAC proved competitive. In 2009, South African company The Unlimited put it to the test against telecom giant Telkom SA. The challenge: move 4GB of data across 60 kilometers. The pigeons won. They delivered and uploaded the data in 2 hours, 6 minutes, and 57 seconds — while Telkom’s ADSL network managed just 4% in the same time.
The internet never fully embraced bird communication, and in doing so, we lost out on a weird, wonderful alternative future.
Stay weird.
IPoAC official IETF standard: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149 More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers
Be weird. Share it. have fun.