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you could totally do this, almost free. I think the entire (pictureless) wikipedia is ~8gb ? maybe more ? That file could be broadcast over multicast off these

you could totally do this, almost free. I think the entire (pictureless) wikipedia is ~8gb ? maybe more ? That file could be broadcast over multicast off these things on their unused frames. For instance, the bird knows that when it flies over some impoverished region, there's maybe 0-3 paying customers probably not maxing out the capacity at any given time. They could freely broadcast wikipedia or other educational books on a multicast basis. It would just require word of mouth and equipment to tell them what to tune into. After, say, 5 days, you eventually get all 8gb and can unzip it.

callesgg 10y ago
"Current revisions only, no talk or user pages; this is probably what you want, and is approximately 12 GB compressed (expands to over 49 GB when uncompressed)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#English-language_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#En...
tlrobinson 10y ago
Some Iranians are already doing basically this with satellite TV equipment: https://www.wired.com/2016/04/ingenious-way-iranians-using-satellite-tv-beam-banned-data/ https://www.wired.com/2016/04/ingenious-way-iranians-using-s... Definitely an interesting idea. Since SpaceX will control the pipe and terminal they could use some of the bandwidth to prime a cache in the terminal with content they know will be commonly accessed. HTTPS makes doing this transparently difficult, though.