It only took Winston two hours to humiliate South Africa's largest telecom company...
Employees at Unlimited IT were fed up. The Internet speeds provided by the national telecom giant, Telkom, were agonizingly slow.
It took forever to send data between Unlimited's offices... unacceptable for a tech firm in 2009.
One employee joked that it would be faster to strap the data to a bird than to send it over the web. Everyone got a good laugh at the thought.
And then it stopped being a joke – and became a way to prove a point...
The Unlimited team got ahold of an 11-month-old carrier pigeon named Winston...
They loaded 4 gigabytes of data onto a memory stick and strapped it to his leg.
The bird took off from an office in Howick, South Africa, tasked with flying a 60-mile route to the coast. At the exact same moment that Winston took flight, the engineers hit "send" on the digital file transfer using Telkom's broadband line.
Don't worry – the folks at Unlimited kept their pigeon race professional. They imposed strict rules on Winston...
- No performance-enhancing birdseed
And as it turns out, Winston didn't need steroids to crush the competition.
The bird arrived at his destination in an hour and eight minutes. Including the time it took to download the data at the other end, the entire physical transfer took two hours, six minutes, and 57 seconds.
In that same time, the high-tech broadband line had transferred just 4% of the data.
Winston trounced the country's alleged leader in data transmission...
It was such a bad defeat that Telkom actually agreed to work on its Internet speeds.
While the stunt was good for a laugh, it also highlighted a critical bottleneck. And it's one that still plagues the tech world today...
The infrastructure used to move data can't keep up with the amount of data we're generating.
For South Africa in 2009, the bottleneck was bandwidth.
For the U.S. in 2025, the bottleneck is inside the massive data centers powering the AI revolution.
We're generating data at a scale Winston couldn't possibly carry...
AI models require lightning-fast transfer speeds... and more energy than we're ready to provide.
The traditional electrical wires that connect our servers are at their physical limits. They're becoming the "Telkom broadband" of the AI era.
To solve this, we need better data-transmission infrastructure. And the companies that provide it are in a perfect spot to profit right now.
Regards,
Joel Litman
May 15, 2026
P.S. Wires aren't the only limit AI is facing today. Data centers are also grappling with an energy shortage.
My friend Joe Austin (from our sister company, Chaikin Analytics) and I have been all over this story. We're tracking a billion-dollar AI spending wave... the massive divide it's creating in U.S. stocks... and the monster wave of capital we expect to hit as soon as May 28.
It all has to do with a select handful of stocks breaking today's biggest AI bottleneck. We've broken it down for you in an urgent briefing. Click here for the details.
