When I transfer data from machine to machine, the data is immediately "usable" on the receiving machine.

When transferring data by physical means, the data needs to be brought to the final point of consumption, and possibly loaded into the host machine if it is not in some form that could be immediately connected/mounted.

So, the real comparison would be transferring data from the host machine to some form of removable media, taking that media to the airplane (early enough to meet all the pre-clearance stuff), waiting for the plane to takeoff, fly, land and then handoff the physical media at the other end.

In many cases, I'm sure the plane is still faster, but if we're talking about its theoretical bandwidth we need to look at the entire "trip" of the packets/data, not just one segment of it.

Assume a scenario wherein you change the destination to Mumbai. Your throughput will get reduced to 110 Mbps (assuming a 20 hour flight), while the bandwidth will stay the same as the networking medium (airline) has not changed, right?

Couple of other points -

* Two media with same bandwidth can have different throughput depending on the distance (i.e latency) or packet loss or other reasons. Consider two 100 Mbps broadband lines from SFO to London. One goes via the east coast, while other via Asia. Both will have different throughput; difference being roughly proportional to the difference in distances.

* 220 Mbps would imply that a maximum of 220 Mb data can pass through the medium, which is not the case, since we are loading TBs of data on the plane.

* The window size in case of an airplane would be the size of the data loaded on it i.e the size of the movie collection.

I was wondering if you derived the number via a similar calculation as above (a full 747), it's a direct reference to the size of the hard drive it's carrying, or just a simple typo?