Monday, August 15, 2016

In-flight 720p streaming video plans compared

Update 2: Govt. regulatory body TRAI allows In-flight Cellular services.
Catch more details here:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/trai-allows-wifi-and-mobile-services-on-board-for-flyers-in-and-over-india/articleshow/62570754.cms
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/telecom-regulator-recommends-internet-in-flight-mobile-calls-in-india-1802235 


Update: A very useful collection of traveller's reviews: https://www.sleepinginairports.net


The today's SMH article mentioning that Quantas has decided to offer free in-flight Wi-Fi is a really good news for frequent travellers and road warriors who need to catch up with their weekly dose of entertainment. Be it the live streaming of Olympic games from Rio or watching the latest Game of Thrones episode, in-flight Wi-Fi can be a real time saver.

I decided to create a hypothetical scenario in which all the passengers in an Airbus-A320 Neo decide to watch the video content for the entire duration of flight. A quick google search threw up these numbers:
A full flight can accommodate 195 passengers.
A minute of 720p video consumes 10MB of bandwidth.
An Airbus can fly for 7 hours on a full tank.
So the maximum data that can be consumed by a flight full of passengers in a flight is:
195*7*60*10= 819,000MB or 819GB (a mammoth size)
Dividing it by the number of passengers, we are looking at an average data consumption of 4.2GB per passenger during a flight. (another very unlikely figure)

I searched for plans of the airlines that satisfied my requirement for video streaming and landed up with this article. I used the plans mentioned on the page and extrapolated numbers for some plans as needful and then plotted the points on a scatter plot to see the relative positions of the 12 airlines.

The graph is as under and the presentation is linked here:

Download the linked presentation.
The readers are invited to point out improvements to the approach. Thanks.

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