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Comment by Jeremy1026 | Hacker News Reader

15 TB of data went through SFOs WiFi on Nov 26, 2017. To me that is the biggest takeaway. That is a lot of data, even for there being a ton of people flying through.

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There was a Windows update that is dated for the 27th. But with timezones it could be the 26th. I’m not sure what timezone Microsoft realeases are in https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4051033/windows-10-...

Assuming a podcast is 50MB, that would be 300k podcasts. If I'm about to jump on a flight, I may download 4-5, which would put that at about 60k people. I just found an article saying 53 million people flew through SFO in 2016. If we distribute those evenly (unreasonable, but ballparks it), we get just under 145k passengers / day.

Obviously web pages and mp3s are much lighter than a typical podcast, so this isn't the best methodology. 15TB is a lot, for sure, but on the busiest travel day of the year, I can rationalize it.

I see extremely few people listening to anything that's not in-flight entertainment on flights.

I bet it's mostly kids watching youtube videos.

That’s funny - I almost never see anyone using inflight entertainment screens any more. People are always watching Netflix or listening to something instead. And I think my view is supported by airlines starting to remove those screens because they’re not being used.

Depends on the airline and the route. On long haul flights on Emirates, who's known for the inflight system, everybody is using it.

Depends on the airline and the plane. If anything, I would have said there was a trend toward in-flight on-demand programming at no charge. It's increasingly delivered over WiFi but, in my experience, there's usually a screen as well. Admittedly, my experience is mostly limited to United (trending toward on-demand) and JetBlue (just free DirectTV AFAIK).

> toward in-flight on-demand programming at no charge

Huh? I've never ever seen a charge for inflight entertainment, and I fly United all the time. Maybe different routes, then.

United charges for DirectTV https://www.united.com/CMS/en-US/travel/Pages/DIRECTV.aspx

On the planes where there's on-demand programming (on your tablet or the seatback), that's free. I mostly bring my own and have never paid but I assume they're phasing out the paid option.

Webpages are pretty huge now, cnn.com is ~2MiB

Easily double that even, if don't use cache (4.4mb on a mobile device, while testing just now).

It’s not that much when you consider the size of the airport and the amount of video people now watch between Netflix, YouTube and FaceTime. You can burn through 1GB and hour with ease, so that’s really only 15,000 video hours of you want to think about it that way. I’d guess on a normal day SFO hosts at least 100,000 people.

SFO had 55.8 million passengers in 2017 so around 150k/day on average.

The graphs are cumulative, so the total is 8 TB (1TB on 5GHz and 7TB on 2.4GHz).

Those iCloud accounts ain't gonna sync themselves!

People get offline versions of podcasts, albums from streaming services, netflix, etc

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