Having recently used Virgin America to transport myself across the country, I was very pleased to have Internet access while I was in the air. This, however, is not the sort of airplane bandwidth and latency that I am going to talk about. Instead, I would like to discuss a comparison between the bandwidth and latency of typical Internet connections with those associated with taking a hard drive on an airplane.
Let’s say we compare a high speed (15Mbit) DSL connection to taking a moderately large hard drive (500GB) on a plane for data rates between San Francisco and Boston (~7 hours):
Bandwidth:
DSL: 15 Mbit/s
Airplane: 
150 Mbit/s
Latency:
DSL: ~100ms
Airplane: >7 hours
For fun, let’s try something a little bigger on both sides: OC-768 vs Boeing 747-400F plane filled with 2TB hard drives.
Bandwidth:
OC-768: 38 Gbit/s
747-400F: 
93 Tbit/s
Latency:
OC-768: <100ms
747-400F: >7 hours
Clearly, hard drives on an airplane will win in a purely bandwidth driven application but airplanes suffer from incredibly high latency. You will have to decide which is best choice based on your particular use scenario.
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