5 ms·

Streaming the video feed using the onbord wifi? I think you are overestimating the quality of the Internet connections available on flights.

by sgt 6y ago

notahacker 6y ago
Having worked on inflight connectivity apps and Earth Observation respectively, for a couple of startups I'm inclined to agree overall. Workarounds would be: [i] ground sync, which would be fine for a lot of use cases where higher revisit rate and sometimes less cloud cover is sufficient to make the imagery valuable, and open up non-wifi flights. Ground sync can be over regular 4G or even swapping flash drives [some W-IFE boxes update this way, though infrequently]. [ii] Getting dedicated bandwidth from the satellite/a2g internet provider, who can potentially allow you a lot more than is made available to an individual consumer, but obviously at a hefty charge. [iii] using streaming codecs designed for low kbps rates - though this is obviously lossy, and pixel perfection matters for a lot of EO use cases.
- csteubs 6y ago
  Great points! We're incorporating aspects of all three workarounds. Ground sync is already possible (wifi isn't available on many regional short-hop flights so we eat the latency), and we're discussing dedicated bandwidth with in-flight wifi providers. We've been paying the $14.99 market rate for customers testing the MVP who receive free in-flight wifi for their efforts, so the resulting cost would be much cheaper. To your last point, we load the last-known tiles expected to be captured on the flight in order to take a visual diff in the air, and then send that diff back down to earth instead of the entire image. This results in a roughly 80% savings in data but requires more hardware.
csteubs 6y ago
Yes and no. Connectivity tests have been an important part of the early work so far but depending on the airline and route, we've consistently averaged 6Mbps upload pre-Covid which has been sufficient. Passenger volume is significantly down post-Covid and that upload number has been about 3x lately. Wifi coverage is ~100% over land and the North Atlantic, so reliability of service is a negligible issue. American Airlines has recently upgraded their in-flight wifi to Gogo's 2Ku systems and we've hit 15Mbps up on those flights, but as another commenter mentioned, the plan is to carve out dedicated bandwidth onboard the flight for better connectivity. A connection is only optional, as we save the recorded data and can upload once the flight lands using wifi on the ground (much cheaper, but with a few hours of latency between recording and becoming a map tile).

Streaming the video feed using the onbord wifi? I think you are overestimating the quality of the Internet connections available on flights.

by sgt 6y ago

Streaming the video feed using the onbord wifi? I think you are overestimating the quality of the Internet connections available on flights.

notahacker 6y ago

Having worked on inflight connectivity apps and Earth Observation respectively, for a couple of startups I'm inclined to agree overall. Workarounds would be: [i] ground sync, which would be fine for a lot of use cases where higher revisit rate and sometimes less cloud cover is sufficient to make the imagery valuable, and open up non-wifi flights. Ground sync can be over regular 4G or even swapping flash drives [some W-IFE boxes update this way, though infrequently]. [ii] Getting dedicated bandwidth from the satellite/a2g internet provider, who can potentially allow you a lot more than is made available to an individual consumer, but obviously at a hefty charge. [iii] using streaming codecs designed for low kbps rates - though this is obviously lossy, and pixel perfection matters for a lot of EO use cases.

csteubs 6y ago
Great points! We're incorporating aspects of all three workarounds. Ground sync is already possible (wifi isn't available on many regional short-hop flights so we eat the latency), and we're discussing dedicated bandwidth with in-flight wifi providers. We've been paying the $14.99 market rate for customers testing the MVP who receive free in-flight wifi for their efforts, so the resulting cost would be much cheaper. To your last point, we load the last-known tiles expected to be captured on the flight in order to take a visual diff in the air, and then send that diff back down to earth instead of the entire image. This results in a roughly 80% savings in data but requires more hardware.

csteubs 6y ago

Yes and no. Connectivity tests have been an important part of the early work so far but depending on the airline and route, we've consistently averaged 6Mbps upload pre-Covid which has been sufficient. Passenger volume is significantly down post-Covid and that upload number has been about 3x lately. Wifi coverage is ~100% over land and the North Atlantic, so reliability of service is a negligible issue. American Airlines has recently upgraded their in-flight wifi to Gogo's 2Ku systems and we've hit 15Mbps up on those flights, but as another commenter mentioned, the plan is to carve out dedicated bandwidth onboard the flight for better connectivity. A connection is only optional, as we save the recorded data and can upload once the flight lands using wifi on the ground (much cheaper, but with a few hours of latency between recording and becoming a map tile).