A FR24 antenna would use less than 40mb a day, hardly bank breaking.

It seems all Internet access is satellite based, so quite expensive:

Saint Helena Island Info: All about St Helena, in the South Atlantic Ocean ? Communications

So your 40 mb (megabits? megabytes?) is several months worth of data at £180.50 per month.

Considering that same telecom company offers 1.2gb of internet for £50 a month, I'd imagine that's highly inaccurate.

40Megabytes, and 1.2 Gigabytes BTW.

Edit: Checked fixed broadband prices £21.66 for 1300megabytes and 7p per extra MB so completely BS figure pulled out there.

I believe there is a cargo ship under construction to service St. Helena at the new jetty pier: http://awshipmanagement.com/2016/03/...-to-st-helena/. Air freight is not an economical way to supply St. Helena. Only high value cargo like seafood exports would be feasible. The high gross weight ERJ 190 looks like it can take a 24,000 lb. payload into St. Helena with full fuel.

There has to be some mistake in the report quote above. 13.3 megabytes of data at a speed of 1.5 megabits per second means the daily/monthly/yearly quota of 13.3 megabytes is consumed in less than 2 minutes (at full speed).

Well, Sure Atlantic, the internet service provider on St Helena has possibly the worst website of any similar outfit I've seen. I can't find what they offer except "Bronze", "Silver", "Gold" and "Gold Plus" packages, ranging in price from £22 to £170 per month. What it doesn't say is how much data each package allows.

However, I do remember reading that the WHOLE island (4000 people) share only 20Mb/s satellite internet capacity, which sort of explains why they have to make it so expensive. In contrast, I'm sitting here in a smallish town in UK with 74Mb/s unlimited all to myself.

I believe they do offer unmetered data access during the night, but the speeds are all pretty miserable. Updating software for example must be a bit of a nightmare. Just a small update to iTunes, for example, downloads hundreds of megabytes. But don't get me onto the inefficiency of modern software writers - I come from an age where personal computers had kilobytes of storage and programmes of a similar size!

The Embraer ERJ190 PP-XMA departed St Helena at 1347 today. It took off on runway 20 and did a circuit then flew at low level to the south of the island around to Jamestown where it did an orbit over the bay before setting course for Brazil. It's heading of 271 degrees suggests a destination of Salvador, rather than it's departure point which was Recife.

The packages do say what they include? The most expensive package gold plus includes just over 14.1gigabytes of internet for £171, which is much more than the amount reguired for FR24, max use of 1.2gigabtes, probably less than a gigabyte.

Anyway thats besides the point.

Thanks for the follow-ons, AerRyan, Bengt and Broken Biscuits. I just quoted what came to hand. It did seem outrageously expensive.

The speeds quoted of 13meg and 1.5 meg are probebly the download/upload speeds. That makes sence for a sat connection.

thats not to bad really

Nope, its shared with 20-50 other people

Here's an interview with the Embraer Company pilot about their tests at St. Helena: https://whatthesaintsdidnext.com/201...rt-are-normal/

There are plans/ideas to link St Helena to one of the new subsea cables being planned across the South Atlantic.

That would remove the restrictions on internet broadband but would come at a cost since some one has to pay for the extra cable construction. If thats the UK Govt they might be wary of more infrastructure funding after the airport debacle

I think I read sometime back that the cost to route the cable via St. Helena was $10 million USD. It sounds cheap compared to what the airport cost.

Would it be possible to further extent the runway on the 20 end to allow largee aircraft take off with larger loads?

You hav'nt looked at what they did to build it have you?
Simple answer is no, unless they spend a couple of hundred million.

I have, but I never got the logic of building something of such mass, yet just small enough that it is fairly impractical.

:ugh: Seriously man! :rolleyes: People are having a perfectly nice discussion about a government project and then you have to go and bring language like the l-word into the discussion! :=

:)

MORE QUESTIONS TO ASK EMBRAER

It seems, the reason for the crash of that Bolivian aircraft in Colombia was because they ran out of fuel. The distance was beyond the range of that aircraft.
Just out of curiousity I had another look at the specifications and range of the Embraer 190 on the page of the manufacturer..

Standard 3426 km or 1850 nm
Long Range 4445 km or 2400 nm
Advanced Range 4537 km or 2450 nm

In the interview with Darrin Henry the Embraer pilots claimed this aircraft can fly nonstop from Cape Town to St. Helena and in case they cannot land on St. Helena they would still have enough fuel to deviate to Ascension and even back to the African mainland.

The distances
Cape Town - St. Helena 3139 km or 1695 nm
St. Helena - Ascension 1295 km or 699 nm
St. Helena . Walvis Bay 2261 km or 1221 nm

With additional mandatory fuel reserves deviating to Acension would be marginal at best. A deviation back to Africa not possible with any of the three versions mentioned above.

Embraer would have to explain why they think the aircraft could even return to Africa. Would it have to be an extraordinary special version with additional fuel tanks and what would the payload / number of passengers then be ?

While safety has top priority the number of passengers the aircraft can carry will have an effect on ticket prices.

3139 km is 1694 nm