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.
> 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.
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.