Nice that instead of completely cutting you off at the cap they put it in super slow 500 kbits. That is actually usable and used to be the fastest speed you could get at home.
A year or so later I upgraded to a v.92 only to realize my ISP (I think it was IDT at the time) didn't support that and only supported some other 56k "standard" (details are sketchy on this, I was like 12). I was devastated and it was too late to drive back to computer city to exchange it for the correct one.
Now I have 10G symmetric in my house.
Anecdotally, even though I'd have told you that 500 was probably enough for non-streaming stuff that I do most of the time, in my experience when my connection switches over to Starlink (I have Comcast primarily, but it has had reliability problems the last few months), it usually hits the Starlink limits pretty hard. I've never identified any nefarious activity, it just seems like all the little things on my workstations and various devices that chatter add up to enough to trigger Starlink's controls.
This is simultaneously fast (on my 14400 bps modem that I spent the most time "waiting for downloading", I was used to 12-13 minutes per megabyte vs. 18 seconds here) and slow (the google homepage is >1MB, so until you have resources cached you're waiting tens of seconds).
It would be nice if everything were just a touch more efficient.
Now, I assume all of this would start working before it's all transferred. But we're still talking about tens of seconds of transfer at 500kbit/sec.
(And Google at least acts like they care about bandwidth a little. So many 15megabyte pages out there...)
Or even better, 62.5KiB (for kibibyte)
Well, we can’t know if Starlink’s marketing team used 2^10 or 10^3, and since it’d inflate their numbers I guess the latter.
So telco rates which are multiples of 56000 or 64000; baud rates which are multiples of 300; ethernet rates which are mostly just powers of 10; etc etc etc.
Of course, there's occasional weird stuff, but usually things have a lot of factors of 5 in there and seem more "decimal-ish" than "binary-ish".
We lived for years on 56kbps, granted the Internet was different back then, but we'd still "use" it, download stuff, etc.
Ok, I’m not normally one to be the pedantic bits/bytes guy, but if you’re gonna go and make a bit/byte “clarification” you need to get the annotation correct or you'll just confuse everyone.
It’s 500kb (small b for bits) and 62.5kB(capital/big B for bytes).
Also what do we actually use the web for? A lot of streaming video and audio that won't work. A lot of reading webpages with a lot of images and ads, that won't work. I'm sure that Wikipedia would load and work slowly, but that's not really representative of web usage today.
There's a separate argument about whether the web should be like that, but regardless of your thoughts on that, it is like that.
The 500KB/sec is more than enough as long as that isn't happening.
- News, phlogs, Wikipedia, translation services -> Gopher or Gemini, gopher://magical.fish and gemini://gemi.dev plus gopher://sdf.org and Bongusta Phlogs. It's magical.
- IRC or IRC+Bitlbee -> IM, Jabber, IRC, most protocols
- Email -> Mbsync+msmtp + mutt. Caching helps there
- Usenet -> Slrn+Slrnpull, it has tech groups, caching and there's a web news discuss group too
- SSH -> Mosh
But most people depend on contacting family and friends via WhatsApp/Messenger/etc, they depend on YouTube for entertainment and education, their TV is increasingly online, they read their newspaper on a website with images, etc.
It's a privilege, and a lifestyle choice, to be able to live on 2.7KBPS.
And in my country people did crazy stuff in order to ilegally watch soccer matches in cable TV's, such as writting magnetic deco cards with an electronic PICF84 based tool.
That compared to using Lagrange and gemini://gemi.dev to read the local newspapers and bookmark them in order to avoid typing down the https:// URL over and over, it's lke going for a Ph.D instead of joining a local library.
People isn't that dump, it's just lazy. And, sadly, uninformed.
In the infamous blackout in Spain, I was the only one in the bus that could fetch the news reliabily over Gemini due to the low bandwitdh. The rest were waiting over and over.
And after that everyone got a pocket radio tuner just because. Something I was just doing over decades too because FM and AM radio will actually work anywhere.
But the web doesn't offer a nice degradation. In the blackout, they just kept sending the full raw data, literal thousands of cookie trackers, JS scripts and the mandatory ads. You at least have https://text.npr.org and https://lite.cnn.com. My country? They just pushed the web SPA's and OFC they set no OPUS stream (something every smartphone understands from at least 2012) with a smaller bitrate.
My 1200 baud from 1987 would beg to differ. Granted, that was for bulletin boards, not the WWW (which hadn't been invented yet).