I signed up! This is something just made for TextMan !
Starlink announced a $8.50AUD/month plan that gives unlimited usage at 500kbits/s.
Modern apps and web pages would immediately back up every buffer and make for a painful experience, but it is fun to consider optimizing inside that tight box (in the 90s, 4x ISDN was high end!).
With Starlink’s good latency, input-distribution multiplayer games would still work fine, as long as they didn’t download anything.
You could even have voice chat. With an optimal implementation, you could scroll the X feed as fast as you want with full text, with progressive images coming in when you pause, but instantly ceasing bandwidth use as you start scrolling again.
Remote shells would work well by default, but we could do a lot better than standard ANSI for complex updates.
Server-rendered web pages or apps could at least be progressively rendered and text-first, with full responsiveness even when the fidelity is low.
The new starlink offering is 5.4 GB a day which is 162GB a month and that’s ok for $8.50 !
If one knows how to schedule DL’s overnight etc ( using ‘at’ ) then during the day, online games and irc are fine, plus speed limited ssh uploads to websites etc.
That is very cool, TextMan, thank you for sharing!
Until mid-2024, I used Launtel’s “0/0” standby 50c/day plan for a remote ADS-B receiver a few hundred km from home. Launtel’s pricing is built around daily charges, so this is a bare minimum service to keep the line active with the NBN and allow one to ramp it up to whatever standard daily speed is required on the days the NBN is being used. In reality although it’s advertised at 0/0, it’s around a 100kbit/100kbit service and there’s plenty of discussion on Whirlpool about its suitability for very basic IoT type use. Prior to that, a 2G/3G $20 SIM starter pack on special with a 365 day activation was my other goto for squeezing some data out of a remote site, ever so slowly eating away at the $20 a few Kbits at a time. Does the Starlink plan allow you to jump out of the 500kbit plan on an ad-hoc basis, or only for whole months at a time?
As you suggested, a lot can be done with 100kbit or 500kbit or whatever slower speed. 100kbit certainly was enough for a remote shell, enough to maintain a reliable Wireguard tunnel, and more than enough to push ADS-B and multlateration data out without any issues (my site closest to YBBN rarely tops 5Kbit/sec). I’m really tempted to see if I can pick up a cheap hardware kit now, as Starlink is starting to get into that pricing bracket where it might be a bit of fun to experiment with, and also it would be a fun challenge to optimise everything for low bandwidth operation again.
100% agree - apparently you and I have the same definition of fun, as I always thoroughly enjoyed optimising for a 56/64/256kbit link whenever I had to do so!
In addition to the scheduled overnight downloads, there’s the potential for a homelabber to set up an on-prem self-hosted proxy cache with TLS inspection functionality as well - install certs on your own devices and have the proxy decrypt any incoming encrypted data to cache it. As it’s essentially a Man-in-the-middle attack by another name (yes, corporate UTM vendors, that’s still a MITM attack even though you like to brand it otherwise ) I wouldn’t even consider it for anything other than my strict on-prem individual use. That massive disclaimer aside (don’t do this, and if you do do this, then at an absolute bare minimum exempt critical things like banking from being decrypted and cached). it would open up the possibilities of using a proxy cache again which would stretch that 500kbit Starlink service a long way for a single user. Sophos UTM/XG Free and squid both jump off the top of the head as being able to do TLS inspection, although I’ve never used the function in either.
I’m now on the new 8.50 AUD/month ‘standby’ plan for 500Kbit/s unlimited data, and everything is much the same as it was, I’m happy to say.
Youtube I had to set back to 480p from HD, which is a pain, but I’m watching less of it these days as click baiting is so bad.
I believe the new ‘standby’ plan was implemented because they had a $10/month for 10GB for holiday travellers in vans etc, that could be used for a couple of weeks then turned off until the next holiday etc. A great idea but some people were missing so many ‘over-the-air’ firmware updates that their Starlink was ‘bricked’ when they next went to use it.
Given they now have 6 million users, that probably means quite a few people had this problem, which meant shipping the unit back to Starlink for repair … which was probably costing Starlink a fortune in lost productivity.
Elon didn’t design ‘standby’ mode for broke-ass retired techs like me it seems.
This report was brought to you by my brand new, received today, ‘Mchose Jet 75 keyboard with Hall-Effect keys’, which is so crisp and sweet, my fingers are still in shock!
I think the Launtel 50c/day plan I discussed earlier in the thread emerged due to a related problem - keeping a NBN FTTN line “alive” so that the copper pair wasn’t nicked for another service. Daily pricing with the option to disconnect the service ad-hoc was great, but if you disconnected it entirely there was a chance that it wouldn’t come back. Keeping the service alive for 50c a day was a good compromise to keep the copper pair active, probably in the same way that keeping the Starlink service alive for $8.50 a month was easier than replacing bricked Starlink hardware.
) I wouldn’t even consider it for anything other than my strict on-prem individual use. That massive disclaimer aside (don’t do this, and if you do do this, then at an absolute bare minimum exempt critical things like banking from being decrypted and cached). it would open up the possibilities of using a proxy cache again which would stretch that 500kbit Starlink service a long way for a single user. Sophos UTM/XG Free and squid both jump off the top of the head as being able to do TLS inspection, although I’ve never used the function in either.