Comment by bahmboo
20 hours ago
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.
20 hours ago
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.
My first company was an ISP, and our selling point was that we had higher bandwith out of Norway than any competitors in our price range.... A whopping 512kps.
I remember being amazingly excited to have saved up enough money to go to the store and buy a 33.6 modem (an amazing upgrade from my 14.4).
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.
Mmmmm ISDN copper…
Copper, but not ISDN. Fractional E1 leased line. There were expensive and limited ISDN connections available in Norway at the time ('95), but not cost effective for an ISP.
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If I remember right we could get 64kb/s or 128kb/s if you bundled them, that was in Germany. But also, we didn't have that, we only had a 56kb/s modem and I remember really wanting ISDN when I was a kid :)
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Still with pretty low latency (25-35ms) as well (similar to the Standby (aka pause) state you can put the account into for $5/mo)
The first modem that I owned was 1200 baud. The first one that I used was 110 and it was exciting when it was upgraded to 300. It took ~20 years from when I first got online until my home internet reached 512kbps.
I bought a cheap 1200 and then once I had use for it I saved up for a USR 14.4 with a shiny extruded aluminum case. At one point I was sharing that with two roommates using SLIP and surplussed Cisco coaxial NICs.
I'd disagree that that is usable today. A few days ago I had some network trouble that restricted me to about 350kbps, although stable without much packet loss, and a lot of stuff just didn't practically work. At that speed, loading images and resources on webpages within timeout limits is hard. Many web apps don't work, or degrade enough that you wouldn't want to use them.
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.
Set your device to "metered network" and all the background shit will stop running. That's what I had to do to get my Starlink mini working in Standby mode. As soon as your device is on WiFi it thinks it's a free for all and starts updating and downloading shit in the background.
The 500KB/sec is more than enough as long as that isn't happening.
I hope we get LLM browser agents that will convert the web back to that state again. You can get sorta close now with adblockers, various "lite" modes, and unofficial client sites, but it would be nice if it were universal.
This is a separate discussion, but while I agree in general that pages should be less bloated than they are, ads shouldn't burn my CPU, etc, I think it's a sign of progress that the web takes much more bandwidth. 4K video is better than HD, is better than SD, is better than no video. Illustrations improve articles. More client side Javascript tends to mean more interactivity which is often a good thing (not always). The web today does so much more than it did 20 years ago, and we should be proud of that achievement rather than push back on progress by expecting the web to work on a connection from 20 years ago.
That's faster than my cell phone in the areas where I desperately need Starlink....500kb > 0
Be aware that it is bits, so 62.5kb. But I agree, the internet is still usable with that.
> Be aware that it is bits, so 62.5kb
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).
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People always use bits for connectivity. 62.5kB/sec -- maybe really 55-60kB/sec downloaded. Or 18 seconds to get a megabyte.
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.
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> the internet is still usable with that.
We lived for years on 56kbps, granted the Internet was different back then, but we'd still "use" it, download stuff, etc.
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I've never heard bandwidth being expressed in bytes. But if we're being pedantic then I'd like to throw my hat in and call it 62.5kB.
Or even better, 62.5KiB (for kibibyte)
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> used to be the fastest speed you could get at home
My 1200 baud from 1987 would beg to differ. Granted, that was for bulletin boards, not the WWW (which hadn't been invented yet).
Good enough to play Quake 3 Arena.
You might just be able to stream 240p youtube without stuttering with that.
No, not nice. Previously, if we exceeded the 50Gb cap, there was the option to continue on at high-speed for $1/Gb. And that's the same price per Gb as the base plan of 50Gb/month for $50. Now, it's either upgrade to unlimited, or enjoy Netflix at 500Kbps. I want the old plan back.
Now the cap is 100G. Seems like an odd complaint. Did you often exceed 100Gb?
It's unlikely that we will exceed 100Gb/month in the camper. But if we do, it's either slow speeds, or pay $165/month for unlimited roam every single month we use it, versus paying a little extra for the few times we go over. In the end, it'll probably work out okay for us, but I liked the previous option of being able to get high-speed data at a reasonable price should we go over the limit.
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Wait, the price didn’t change though did it? So you get 100 gigs for the price of 50 before?
If I calculate correctly then 500 kbps is actually enough for Netflix in standard quality. If one wants to binge watch 4K (7 GB per hour) then the unlimited plan makes more sense anyway.