Steve
I think you are missing the point of my post.
Despite the claims of the mobile network providers that they cover 99% of the country, I'm sure we've all experienced visiting places that get poor or no signal on one or more networks. So Lee's comment about £16.00 for unlimited data is not always going to be correct, as PaulSS has experienced. I was not referring to regional (or post code) differences in pricing by any particular network provider but that the best priced provider may not be available in some areas, due to cr@ppy signal.
Not wanting to overly labour the point but there are only four physical networks in the UK at the moment.
EE
Three
Vodafone
O2.
There are good deals directly or via MVNOs on all of them. It’s a competitive market.
EE – direct, if you commit to 24 months, £19 for 15GB
EE MVNO - £15 for 10GB (Asda mobile)
Three – direct, £10 for 12GB, going up to £14 for 30GB on 24 months
Three MVO - £15 for 50GB (iD mobile)
Vodafone - £24 for 1GB going up to £36 for unlimited
Vodafone MVNO - £15 for 15GB going up to £20 for 45GB (Voxi)
O2 – £21 for 9GB
O2 MVNO - £10 for 9GB data, or £20 for 100GB. (Giffgaff)
So, five minutes finds you a good deal if you can only use one network, if there’s a choice, then it gets better. Half those prices, in general, for 2GB.
The big issue is not the cost, for a club, strip with more than one resident, or an airfield. It’s peanuts. My club has a mobile broadband set up that serves two video cameras… it never runs out of data, and costs under £10.
The issue is the cost for one station maintainer with no financial assistance or sharing of the burden. £20/month is £240/year, that's the cost of BMAA membership and a year’s aircraft permit. I don't expect one individual to carry that.
So I agree with you there about the cost...
I’m curious about data traffic levels, whilst I can imagine a very large number of transactions, I can’t see the actual transactions themselves being very big. I’m guessing the updates are the big data overheads, as maybe the whole image has to be downloaded, unzipped then the current files need to be overwritten. This means a big download.
It would need some work, but if the stock Raspbian repository were to be replaced by a custom PAW one, then apt could run once every day, and perhaps this would allow just the changed files to be downloaded. Apt is currently not used in the ATOM GRID.
This is clueless guesswork in the dark, as I have no idea how the update actually works, and I don’t expect that info to be outside the development team.
So my question would be, if there was one monthly update to the firmware, how big would it be? 430MB? That's a huge dollop...
How big a proportion of the total monthly data overhead would this be? Nebulous question, as it depends on the flying weather. 18 months ago, IIRC someone said about 150MB traffic?
I don't expect this question to be answered, as it's confidential. But if it gets read, that's enough for me.