You’ll never be able to go over 168GB, let them call it the 169.69 plan
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.
Ask why you don’t have a European option instead of Starlink.
An 8 bit micro didn't have bandwidth for more than 256kbps, and hence you only saw them use SD or DD floppies.
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?
Got an isdn link in 98, so fast.
500,000 - you can do a lot.
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.
I'd also need to upgrade my batteries, deep cycle marine batteries aren't cheap. So like yeah I could get starlink on there if I really wanted it but it would not be cheap. If I was a different kind of sailor it would be worth it but it's not a trivial upgrade. But I'm on the great lakes, I rarely have to go more than a day or two without cell signal. If it was just a matter of slapping new panels on there I'd go for it though.
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
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.
"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...
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.
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.
dlcarrier•5mo ago
Here's an article with more details: https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/starlink-drops-roam-10gb-pl...