Broadband promised to unite the world with super-fast data delivery - but  it seems the web is still no faster than a humble pigeon.

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

The internet company said it was not responsible for the firm's slow internet speeds.

The idea for the race came when a member of staff at Unlimited IT complained about the speed of data transmission on ADSL.

He said it would be faster by carrier pigeon.

"We renown ourselves on being innovative, so we decided to test that statement," Unlimited's Kevin Rolfe told the Beeld newspaper.

'No cats allowed'

Winston took off from Unlimited IT's call centre in the town of Howick to deliver the memory stick to the firm's office in Durban.

According to Winston's website there were strict rules in place to ensure he had no unfair advantage.

They included "no cats allowed" and "birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within".

The firm said Winston took one hour and eight minutes to fly between the offices, and the data took another hour to upload on to their system.

"We expect this technology to be avaliable to the public within four years", said Winston.

Mr Rolfe said the ADSL transmission of the same data size was about 4% complete in the same time.