[slang800]

Plus a plane, bus, or train could easily have 50 people within range. Assuming everyone has 8GB of cache space on their phones, you could access about 0.4TB of content directly. With a mesh network that supports packet forwarding, you could connect with everyone on the plane, meaning 100-700 people, which would give you 0.8-5.6TB of content.

Obviously content would be highly duplicated between peers, but you'd have access to a significant chunk of the "popular" internet, and would be able to avoid in-flight WiFi.

For such a mesh network, you don't even necessarily need to connect over WiFi - lower energy Bluetooth could be used too.

[clueless404]

> Assuming everyone has 8GB of cache space on their phones

That feels optimistic. I doubt people have that much free space on their phones, especially those that don't have flash cards. Heck, a basic iPhone won't have. Even a 16GB model has something like only 12 GB free when it's empty.

> For such a mesh network, you don't even necessarily need to connect over WiFi - lower energy Bluetooth could be used too.

IPFS doesn't (currently) work over Bluetooth.

However, my main point is, that I don't think most people would be altruistic enough to participate unless they could plug in their phones on the plane.