A Pigeon is still faster than the Internet
In 2009, a company in South Africa proved a homing pigeon was faster than an ADSL connection, flying a 4 GB USB flash drive to prove it.
Besides IEEE's speculative work, nobody's actually re-run the 'bird vs. Internet' race in over a decade.
Now that I have gigabit fiber, I thought I'd give it a try.
Video
I published a video with all the details—and even more background on the graceful birds used in the experiment—over on my YouTube channel: