According to the news story the pigeon flew the 60 miles between two sites in 68 minutes.  This is very nearly 60mph (well more like 53mph).  Meanwhile Wikipedia says the average speed of homing pigeons over moderate distances is about 30mph. (OK – there is no citation for that).  A few years ago a pigeon-fancier in Wales won £30,000 when his bird won a race, flying at an average of 41mph so Winston was really doing well to fly more than 25% faster than a bird that won a prize like that!

Maybe the birds can go faster over shorter distances, but even so 53mph sounds pretty bloody impressive, and a little suspicious… has it been tested for performance-enhancing drugs?

Meanwhile, our cats have asked me to ditch Virgin Media broadband and buy a crate of pigeons, but I think they may have an ulterior motive.

So in the case of Virgin Media and our 10 Megabit per second (Mbps) product, we are providing 8.7 out of that, so that’s 87%. That’s nearly 90% of the actual speed we are advertising, so in our case, yes, people are getting as close to that speed as possible.

Where do I start?   You have to appreciate the attempt at sleight of hand with 8.7…  that’s 87%…  which is nearly 90%… which is nearly 100%     I would like to see him visiting the doctor to be told his temperature is 38.8, which is as good as 37 which is NEARLY 40 DEGREES! Call an ambulance!

As for the assertion that 90% is as close to 100% as possible…  has this man never heard of, say, 91%?

What he says is probably true.  You would have to be blindly optimistic to expect the full possible speed on your connection unless you were downloading files from your ISP’s own server, connecting to your modem via ethernet, not sharing your connection at all, and certain there was nothing running in the background, but that doesn’t excuse teh sloppy maths.  These days it feels like 100% is taboo: it is either “90% is as close to 100% as possible” or “I’m giving 110% effort”

Recently I noticed that they were claiming that if a fault turned out to be with their service and not with your own computer they would refund the cost of the phone call.  Good but complicated: I wouldn’t have total confidence in that happening un-prompted and wouldn’t fancy looking like a cheapskate by chasing down a refund.

Today I got an e-mail saying that, as a result of comments received in surveys, they are dropping the charge for technical support.  A shame they introduced it in the first place, but unqualified praise for admitting they were wrong and doing a u-turn.

What a brilliant technical problem though! Routine maintenance caused thousands of modems and set-top boxes to lose their IP addresses, and then because so many of them requested new IP addresses at the same time Virgin’s routers just surrendered.