Carmack's comments and the comments in the thread entirely surprise me.
256kbit/s was pretty much the standard ADSL speed 20 years ago. I remember thinking it was lucky some of my friends had 512kbit/s and 1500kbit/s was considered extremely fortunate.
Even still calls over Skype worked fine, you could run IRC or MSN Messenger while loading flash games or downloading MP3s. You could definitely play games like Starcraft, Age of Empires, Quake, UT2004, etc. on a 256k ADSL line. Those plans were also about 8x the price of this plan, not even adjusting for inflation.
Not only that, those lines were typically only 64k upload speed. The usefulness of a 500kbit/s up/down line is incredibly high. I think the only reason it might seem less useful now is that web services are not typically optimised to be usable on dial-up speeds like they were 20 years ago.
With the right setup and having feeds/content download asynchronously rather than "on-demand", 500kbit/s is still plenty of internet by today's standards.
The Dancing Baby gif, which was abnormally large, and went viral via email in 1996, is around 220 KB. At this speed, it would load in 3.5 seconds. And being 4 seconds long, it could stream.
No even that was fine and common. Massive blocks of ads, analytics, etc werent the norm though and i for one miss a time we wouldnt conceive of introducing it.
This plan replaces "pause" functionality that allowed you to put your subscription on hold. Hence:
"Starlink also states that "Standby Mode is not intended for constant, maritime, or high-bandwidth use," although the terms do not explicitly prohibit this, and we don't know if or how Starlink would enforce this intention.
Additionally, Standby mode is only intended for use for 12 months or less. After that, Starlink can, in its discretion, require either a move to a standard plan or loss of all connectivity except for access to the user's Starlink account."
Nothing to get excited here about, then. It's not a plan, per se. It's an add-on. I would not resort to it for IoT, surveillance, etc.
It's also one of the many frequent changes they introduce to their plans, so I would especially not rely on this staying as is for long.
Meanwhile, Garmin reorganized their (Iridium-based) inReach plans and took away a "suspend" option last year, and adding a lower "enabled" plan tier. They recently reintroduced the suspend option, so I guess they saw more uproar and customer loss than they anticipated.
Suspension is a total pause of service at zero recurring cost, for up to 12 months. The enabled rate is a new tier of service for about $8/mo that supports SOS and pay-as-you-go message pricing for any other use.
It is interesting to see that some competition in this area may actually start to redefine the offerings.
The Garmin change was pretty gross, they tried to market the change as "instead of suspending your plan when you don't need it, now you just cancel your plan anytime and renew when you want", but they didn't call attention to the fact that renewing after cancelling results in a $60 "reactivation" charge. Which, for the lower tier plans, is the equivalent of 4 months of service. So, if for example, you cancel for 6 months over the winter, then renew in spring/summer, they essentially charge you for 4 of the 6 months you were cancelled.
It's also fun since Garmin devices are safety-critical devices, and with those plan changes people are now more incentivized to hold off on having a plan in order to save money; they've created incentive for people to be less safe.
As a kid I used to want the fastest internet I could get my hands on. Downloading games, streaming YouTube, etc. But my habits have changed. I prefer text-based websites like this one, I do most of my computing in an SSH session. I avoid bloaty software, not out of some principled stance, but out of personal preference for simple things. I'd do fine with 500Kbps, and never thought I'd say that.
This is incredible. The amount of embedded and mobile systems that can utilise this is big. Think vehicle (car, ship, etc) tracking, IoT devices, remote sensors in the field, even remote cameras in the field. Search and rescue devices, etc.
Lots of use-cases already proved by the more limited Iridium modules that are available on the market.
I'm however curious what having orders of magnitude more low-bandwidth devices connected to a satellite would do compared to having fewer high-bandwidth devices.
How would that affect the individual satellite's capacity?
This would be really useful for embedded systems. Really, I could use it for all of my home automation, which is currently the only reason I have Comcast. I want high-speed data access, but my house doesn't care. I keep high-speed data access with me, in the form of a cellphone, so I could use it whether I'm at home or on the go, and keep my IoT devices on a Starlink connection.
This is what Swarm Technologies, acquired by Starlink, was for. The utility here is not to think of the normal/typical internet usage but for the likes of IoT devices at remote places or moving objects. For $5 /mo (I think per device/connection) is a lot for their use cases — ping the location and some metadata once an hour or so.
Never had any issues with their support; they sent me free stuff and always helped me fast. That's in the eu though where we have laws to help paying consumers or get fined. What americans seem to hate so much as it cost the company money to give a minimum qos. I would not use starlink if I had another choice though, but there is nothing else where I am.
Lots of rural places with zero cell coverage. Where I live cell coverage goes to zero as soon as you leave a city. I've long wanted this for a low data rate base station for a mobile Meshtastic network out hiking and camping. Remains to be seen if this new plan would work for that, but I am interested for that and a remote sensing project in my professional life.
One could imagine similar, more serious uses for remote sensors, agriculture etc. Local mesh network to a base station, satellite uplink to the data consumer. Even in places with cellular coverage, it could be useful as an emergency fallback connection.
I actually moved onto a yacht post COVID and was able to afford a rural cabin with starlink because of that. Judging by the used boat market that seems to have been more common than you would think.
Covid was the best time to get a yacht in living memory. IDK why small recreational sailboats are so associated with wealth, it's a very accessible middle class hobby and most of the people doing it are not particularly wealthy. If you can afford a second car you can afford a sailboat.
The problem with starlink for sailing is the power usage. Prime solar panel space is pretty limited on a sub-30 foot boat and the starlink hardware takes approximately as much power as everything else you would want to run combined (gps/plotter, ais, nav lights, radios). Unless they're releasing new hardware this won't really be usable except on large cruising boats, which are more of a rich people thing.
Carmack's comments and the comments in the thread entirely surprise me.
256kbit/s was pretty much the standard ADSL speed 20 years ago. I remember thinking it was lucky some of my friends had 512kbit/s and 1500kbit/s was considered extremely fortunate.
Even still calls over Skype worked fine, you could run IRC or MSN Messenger while loading flash games or downloading MP3s. You could definitely play games like Starcraft, Age of Empires, Quake, UT2004, etc. on a 256k ADSL line. Those plans were also about 8x the price of this plan, not even adjusting for inflation.
Not only that, those lines were typically only 64k upload speed. The usefulness of a 500kbit/s up/down line is incredibly high. I think the only reason it might seem less useful now is that web services are not typically optimised to be usable on dial-up speeds like they were 20 years ago.
With the right setup and having feeds/content download asynchronously rather than "on-demand", 500kbit/s is still plenty of internet by today's standards.
No need to be surprised, 512 kbps isn't enough because it would take a gif half a minute to load at those speeds. We just didn't send gifs back then.
We totally did, and they loaded and played progressively. More like we weren't pushing 20MB of JavaScript to people browsers.
The Dancing Baby gif, which was abnormally large, and went viral via email in 1996, is around 220 KB. At this speed, it would load in 3.5 seconds. And being 4 seconds long, it could stream.
No even that was fine and common. Massive blocks of ads, analytics, etc werent the norm though and i for one miss a time we wouldnt conceive of introducing it.
Browsing the internet on a 256 kbps SDSL modem in BeOS in 1998 is still the fastest web experience I’ve ever had.
This plan replaces "pause" functionality that allowed you to put your subscription on hold. Hence:
"Starlink also states that "Standby Mode is not intended for constant, maritime, or high-bandwidth use," although the terms do not explicitly prohibit this, and we don't know if or how Starlink would enforce this intention.
Additionally, Standby mode is only intended for use for 12 months or less. After that, Starlink can, in its discretion, require either a move to a standard plan or loss of all connectivity except for access to the user's Starlink account."
Nothing to get excited here about, then. It's not a plan, per se. It's an add-on. I would not resort to it for IoT, surveillance, etc.
It's also one of the many frequent changes they introduce to their plans, so I would especially not rely on this staying as is for long.
https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/starlink-drops-roam-10gb-pl...
Meanwhile, Garmin reorganized their (Iridium-based) inReach plans and took away a "suspend" option last year, and adding a lower "enabled" plan tier. They recently reintroduced the suspend option, so I guess they saw more uproar and customer loss than they anticipated.
Suspension is a total pause of service at zero recurring cost, for up to 12 months. The enabled rate is a new tier of service for about $8/mo that supports SOS and pay-as-you-go message pricing for any other use.
It is interesting to see that some competition in this area may actually start to redefine the offerings.
The Garmin change was pretty gross, they tried to market the change as "instead of suspending your plan when you don't need it, now you just cancel your plan anytime and renew when you want", but they didn't call attention to the fact that renewing after cancelling results in a $60 "reactivation" charge. Which, for the lower tier plans, is the equivalent of 4 months of service. So, if for example, you cancel for 6 months over the winter, then renew in spring/summer, they essentially charge you for 4 of the 6 months you were cancelled.
It's also fun since Garmin devices are safety-critical devices, and with those plan changes people are now more incentivized to hold off on having a plan in order to save money; they've created incentive for people to be less safe.
As a kid I used to want the fastest internet I could get my hands on. Downloading games, streaming YouTube, etc. But my habits have changed. I prefer text-based websites like this one, I do most of my computing in an SSH session. I avoid bloaty software, not out of some principled stance, but out of personal preference for simple things. I'd do fine with 500Kbps, and never thought I'd say that.
This is incredible. The amount of embedded and mobile systems that can utilise this is big. Think vehicle (car, ship, etc) tracking, IoT devices, remote sensors in the field, even remote cameras in the field. Search and rescue devices, etc.
Lots of use-cases already proved by the more limited Iridium modules that are available on the market.
I'm however curious what having orders of magnitude more low-bandwidth devices connected to a satellite would do compared to having fewer high-bandwidth devices.
How would that affect the individual satellite's capacity?
This would be really useful for embedded systems. Really, I could use it for all of my home automation, which is currently the only reason I have Comcast. I want high-speed data access, but my house doesn't care. I keep high-speed data access with me, in the form of a cellphone, so I could use it whether I'm at home or on the go, and keep my IoT devices on a Starlink connection.
Here's an article with more details: https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/starlink-drops-roam-10gb-pl...
This is what Swarm Technologies, acquired by Starlink, was for. The utility here is not to think of the normal/typical internet usage but for the likes of IoT devices at remote places or moving objects. For $5 /mo (I think per device/connection) is a lot for their use cases — ping the location and some metadata once an hour or so.
Yup, or to go after Iridium's market share.
Starlink direct to cell offers IOT options too
Not really, no, it's not for IoT, it's not even a full-blown plan: https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/starlink-drops-roam-10gb-pl...
Loads of cool things happened with 9600, 14.4, 28.8, ahh courier hst!
Got an isdn link in 98, so fast.
500,000 - you can do a lot.
Could see that working for out of band management - ssh etc
Does Starlink have tech support yet? Or heck... a billing contact would have been nice as well. Maybe the $5/month account doesn't get you either?
Never had any issues with their support; they sent me free stuff and always helped me fast. That's in the eu though where we have laws to help paying consumers or get fined. What americans seem to hate so much as it cost the company money to give a minimum qos. I would not use starlink if I had another choice though, but there is nothing else where I am.
You don’t see the irony in this comment?
Ask why you don’t have a European option instead of Starlink.
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500kbit/s is pretty usable if the latency is good and it's also the upload speed. But I'm guessing the second part isn't true.
What exactly is the point of abusing the word “unlimited” here?
You’ll never be able to go over 168GB, let them call it the 169.69 plan
just like going to an all you can eat buffet, you're _limited_ by what you can fit in your stomach. it's pretty simply.
Do you also consider your unmetered fiber connection to not be unlimited?
You pointed out the difference yourself, it's unmetered, not unlimited.
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so the only true unlimited internet is the one that have infinite bandwidth
Almost all wireless plans have a cap on the amount of data you can download on top of the speed cap.
This is surely satire. Obviously most people wouldn’t understand the relevance of or know where that number came from.
It's completely unrealistic. Musk would have to call it 169.420
Watching YouTube 360p, emails and other non multitasking. I love it. Kinda like slow cooking.
Kinda surprising that you can do video when 500kbps was the read speed of some floppy drives of old.
An 8 bit micro didn't have bandwidth for more than 256kbps, and hence you only saw them use SD or DD floppies.
I routinely watch youtube on 128kbps. I'm not missing out on anything, except loading times, which also holds true for (some) web pages.
For who? The use case is miniscule given cell data towers already exist. How many of us even still own a yacht post covid?
Lots of rural places with zero cell coverage. Where I live cell coverage goes to zero as soon as you leave a city. I've long wanted this for a low data rate base station for a mobile Meshtastic network out hiking and camping. Remains to be seen if this new plan would work for that, but I am interested for that and a remote sensing project in my professional life.
One could imagine similar, more serious uses for remote sensors, agriculture etc. Local mesh network to a base station, satellite uplink to the data consumer. Even in places with cellular coverage, it could be useful as an emergency fallback connection.
For people who are spending more for the same use cases.
I'd like you to endure the suffering from mobile providers of where I live.
I have 4 providers available. All bad in my area. Live near the county HQ
I actually moved onto a yacht post COVID and was able to afford a rural cabin with starlink because of that. Judging by the used boat market that seems to have been more common than you would think.
Covid was the best time to get a yacht in living memory. IDK why small recreational sailboats are so associated with wealth, it's a very accessible middle class hobby and most of the people doing it are not particularly wealthy. If you can afford a second car you can afford a sailboat.
The problem with starlink for sailing is the power usage. Prime solar panel space is pretty limited on a sub-30 foot boat and the starlink hardware takes approximately as much power as everything else you would want to run combined (gps/plotter, ais, nav lights, radios). Unless they're releasing new hardware this won't really be usable except on large cruising boats, which are more of a rich people thing.
Starlink Mini consumes 25-40W. That's 0.3/0.5kWh a day.
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