Carrier pigeons are being used to transfer data between offices because bosses believe it is quicker than broadband.
Computer experts at a South African firm said it took six hours to transfer four gigabytes of encrypted data from Durban to a call centre 50 miles away near Pietermaritzburg.
Staff at Unlimited Group, a financial services company, today attached a memory card to the leg of a pigeon called Winston who took just over an hour for the trip.
To send four gigabytes of encrypted information takes around six hours on a good day.
'If we get bad weather and the service goes down then it can up to two days to get through.
'We started looking at other ways to solve the problem and discovered that carrier pigeons could do the job a lot more quickly.'
