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That's a lot of data to transmit via satellite and satellite bandwidth is expensive. Most planes don't crash into the middle of the ocean with all of the transponders turned off so it's an expensive solution for a very rare problem. Satellite-based ADS-B seems to be the future going forward. Everyone can see a plane out in the middle of the ocean and can immediately know where to look if it happens to go down.

Not that Satellite-based ADS-B would have helped in this instance, because the ADS transponder was turned off early in the piece.

Is it actually lots of data? I assume it would all be just numbers, which can be quite small when stored in binary format (+ compression).

I guess this was a bandwith problem when most of today's commercial air planes were designed and later on no one considered it. Probably will come sooner or later.

No, I think it’s more an issue of reliability

Does that matter if we're only going to use it in a situation like this? Some low reliability redundancy would still be nice