I came across this interesting sidebit in an old issue of The New Yorker (Oct16, 2006), written by Nick Paumgarten.

He talks about Yossi Vardi, an Israelite living in the US, who helped found ICQ. During a talk he presented at a Gadgetoff (an annual gathering devoted to “bringing the smart and the useless together”), he promised to show how you can transfer data faster with snails than with broadband.

“He compared various data-transfer systems: ISDN, ADSL, Wi-Fly (that is, pigeons). Then he showed a slide of a snail hitched to a tiny chariot with DVDs for wheels. If each disk contains 4.7 gigabytes of data, and if the snail (chasing a scrap of lettuce) travels at 0.000023 metres per second, the snail-system performance rate is over thirty-seven megabits per second. That blows ADSL out of the water.”

Of course, he acknowledges that the technology is not perfect. Specifically in France,

“culinary habits may pose a denial-of-service problem”