You can set how much hard drive space to allocate for caching, say you allocate 50GB, it will download scenery the first time you fly somewhere, but then it will keep that data for when you fly there again.
I have a 30mb connection and it's never once caused an issue in the Alpha, apart from the initial flight loading taking a minute longer I don't think you would ever notice.
Apologies, I'm going to repeat this back to you a bit, but just so I understand correctly:
So when I start my first flight, it spends a few minutes downloading all the satellite data for within say a 10 square mile radius, then as I fly, it downloads more as you fly in whatever direction, then that is cached, up to your cache size limit that you can pre-define?
If you don't download satellite photo data, what is the default scenery? Autogen fields? Or is it a more basic, less detailed satellite image?
What’s the point in buying OrbX’s Innsbruck handcrafted airport when the default one is also handcrafted?
Quite. Though I do know Orbx also added buildings to the surrounding area, particularly the blocks of flats as you approach the runway, useful in low visibility conditions. There is also a spired church on the route that indicates when you should make the final turn, again Orbx haven't got this in yet, but they may consider adding it into their scenery pack. I don't know what the MS hand crafted one includes, it might just be the airport.