Originally Posted by
phltraveler
I would be curious to know what wireless standard they are using. To support 150 passengers at 3mbps, it'd require 450mbps. Wireless N is theoretically 600mbps but that requires dual band (not every device has, both on router and client side) and you never get the max speed. 802.11ac supports 1.9GBPS and beyond in dual band, but the same caveats apply, plus the standard is relatively new and not only do many devices not support it, but I find it difficult to imagine it would get certified/tested quickly enough for the installs they're doing now.
Remember that you're in a really good situation up in the air in that there are no "neighbors" to compete on channels. So they could run 3 2.4 GHz channels and 20 (?) 5 Ghz channels if they deploy enough access points. Of course, if someone on the plane is running an access point or ad hoc network, the interference could reduce coverage.
They should be able to have plenty of wifi bandwidth if they design it right and avoid bandwidth-sapping legacy protocol support.
Originally Posted by
phltraveler
Transcoding isn't computationally cheap for streaming, so the "bandwidth" message might be a misnomer generated when there is some chokepoint (CPU, RAM, disk access, or actual bandwidth).
To support the number of clients they need to support, they shouldn't be doing any real-time transcoding at all.
Let's say they're streaming at 2.5mbps. That's 500mbps across all 200 streams or 60MB/sec. That's way more than you can sustain in random 4k reads with an HDD but well within what a single consumer SSD can support.
Yeah, I have a dual band wireless N wifi card from intel, and a new dual band Wireless AC 1.9gbps router at home. With the wireless N dual band capable card on that, I should see a theoretical max of 600mbps. Within 5 feet and open air to the router, it registers at 144mbps in windows - and of course, when you do a speedtest or activities, I don't max my 100mbps connection out, not even close (speed is around 50mbps). Combine that with all the people on the crowded 2.4ghz band, plus the number of devices, and you're not going to get close to that.
Not sure how relevant the maximum bandwidth to a single client is representative of how many tcp connections pumping 2.5mbit video streams a single access point can support.
The fact that someone can join and then have consistent quality and then it gives the bandwidth message makes me think there's some sort of session reservation logic and then once whatever metric is hit that says the system is at capacity, it stops accepting new sessions.
I wonder where this reservation logic is, though. Are there any planes with both wifi video streaming and satellite internet yet?