Geerling geared up the pigeon with 3TB of microSD cards and commenced the race.

The bird flew a mile in approximately one minute, at which point the data was taken from the SanDisk flash drives and compared with the same amount of data transferred across the Internet.

Geerling calculated that a pigeon would still be a faster data transfer method up to a distance of 600 miles.

Geerling tested how the gigabit fibre would fare against him taking the SD cards on an aeroplane and flying from his US home to the targeted Canadian data centre, which was again slower until distances of around 5,000 miles.

We guess pigeons don’t have to bother with immigration.

According to Geerling, his "Gigabit connection" manages transport speeds of around 75Mbps, not the 1Gbps promised.

A similar experiment was conducted in 2009 by a South African company. That pigeon carried a 4GB memory stick and raced against the local ISP Telkom's ADSL service. In the time the pigeon took to travel and then upload the data, ADSL only managed to send 4 per cent of the data.

No one appears to have tested the data flow of a fully laden African swallow.