NZFF

I have been looking forward to the improvements in FS2024, but I have concerns as to whether or not I will be able to actually run it.
With most of the scenery streamed' and less on the hard drive' a fast internet connection is required. I get 50 to 70 mbs max. I'm on a digital link as opposed to fibre (which will never become available where we are. There is a group of residents looking at a self funding/Chorus subsidy option, but it needs 37 households to cough up $4700 each). That figure may drop to 35 mbs with other loads and peak system demands. From what I'm reading it ideally requires 100 mbs. Also, the downloads are huge with Toms Hardware suggesting up to 81 GB/hr in densely populated areas. I'm sure that's the exception but it still hints at very large data useage.

Yes it does seem a strange decision, to go for a smaller install and very high ongoing data transfer.
However M$ is in the server business not PC hardware sales, so this may be driven by the Mothership.
This also opens the path to subscription-based charging.

I would like to see my commonly used flying areas downloaded to my PC (=all of NZ) and only loaded when a selected flight indicates the need.
Perhaps there will be such an option?

Here, the router is set up to serve the home office at the other end of the house, so there's another old router attached to it, which is a lot slower, but is more reliable. So I normally get 11Mbps. The alpha worked great on this, but I'd like it a bit quicker for the release version. I am hoping to improve things a bit, but at least I know it'll work.

Yes, you can use a cache just like 2020, and choose what you load there, and you can also download some things locally.

At one stage with the alpha, I was zooming the drone around Italy, at a ridiculous speed, and the scenery managed to keep up to a certain extend. Every few minutes I'd outrun the stream, and it would take a second to redraw the scenery, but for normal flight speeds I have no doubt it would keep up. Of course there's a lot more to come, including the NZ World Update content, so things might get rough at my normal internet speed. However on a good day I can aim the main router and get 60Mbps, so I just need to figure out how to get this constantly.

EDIT: after looking through some logs, most of my alpha testing was done at around 15Mbps.