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Flying for Thanksgiving

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11–20 of 114 posts

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#11

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.

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…

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

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#12
Given that Thanksgiving 2016's bandwidth is unremarkable, maybe Thanksgiving Sunday of 2017 had some sort of external factor, like weather-related flight delays? Though I didn't find any news specifically calling out flight delays, this was the closest and pretty vague:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/sunshine-us-fog-flight-delays-west...

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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).

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#14

Flying on Thanksgiving Day is a joy. I've done it twice now. The ATL concourses are practically empty. It is a bit strange to see the flight boards almost empty on a Thursday morning. I do bring $5 Starbucks gift cards for the entire crew of every flight I'm on to thank them for having to work on a day when most of the country is with family. It's not much, but it's something. The folks flying on holidays are low on…

This is a great idea. I'm going to do the same when I fly out Thanksgiving as well. Thank you

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#16

Growing up, my Chinese family didn't really celebrate Christmas. Consequently, we would always travel for family vacations on Christmas day. Christmas day flights were generally slightly cheaper than non-Christmas day flights, which was nice. --- I also like how the writer asked for the daily number of unique users but got bandwidth usage instead.

If it wasn’t for your people, my people would starve on Christmas.

https://www.npr.org/2017/12/25/573415894/why-do-jewish-peopl...

:-)

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#17

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.

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…

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.

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#18
Friends and I, for years, used to go to Vegas for thanksgiving -- late 90s until mid 2000s. The change in travel patterns and when people flew was interesting.

The reason for vegas - multiple people from different areas that mostly had direct flights to Vegas.

These days, I tend to pick areas that are quiet and relatively easy to get to -- a lot of those have been exploring the Sierra or remote parts of the coast.

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#19

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.

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.

Re: Flying for Thanksgiving

#20

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.

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.
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