General Guidance
Compression
The platform can compress the stream with Zstd, which typically cuts wire volume several-fold on this payload. It is opt-in by the client: gRPC only compresses a response when the client advertises support in its grpc-accept-encoding header, so a client that does not register a Zstd provider receives the stream uncompressed.
Zstd is not one of gRPC's built-in encodings, so most clients need it registered explicitly:
| Client | Compressed? |
|---|---|
.NET (Grpc.Net.Client) | Yes, once a Zstd ICompressionProvider is added to GrpcChannelOptions.CompressionProviders |
| Go, Java, Python | Yes, once a Zstd compressor is registered with the gRPC runtime |
| grpcurl | No — grpcurl has no compression option, so the quickstarts stream uncompressed |
Build your decoder to handle both: attempt a Zstd decompress and fall back to treating the payload as plain bytes. The Docker quickstart does exactly that.
If bandwidth matters to you, register a Zstd provider in your client. Get in touch if you would like another encoding supported.
Always-current state
The platform streams the live state of every aircraft: each record is a complete, up-to-the-moment snapshot — every field currently known for that aircraft. You're always working with its freshest position and status.
Each field appears as soon as a current value is available for it — see the Aircraft reference.
Reconnection
Streams can drop unexpectedly — network blips, planned platform updates, or transient errors. Build your client to auto-reconnect with exponential backoff (e.g. 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s etc) and resume the stream automatically.
Network
The Streaming Platform is hosted in AWS us-west-2 (Oregon) and works well from any location with a reasonable internet connection. The closer your consumer sits to that region — by physical distance or network path — the lower the round-trip latency and the higher the sustained throughput.