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By Someone1234 2026-01-1417:3112 reply I'm actually a huge fan of "unlimited slow speeds" as a falloff, instead of a cliff.
Aside from the fact it allows you to work with Starlink to buy more fast speed, it also allows core stuff to continue to function (e.g. basic notifications, non-streaming web traffic, etc).
By consumer451 2026-01-1418:196 reply > I'm actually a huge fan of "unlimited slow speeds" as a falloff, instead of a cliff.
When on cellular, I like to call that "HN-only mode." It is one of the few web properties that is entirely usable at 2G speeds.
I would kill for a web renaissance to return to this format of webpages, as least as an option. Not only loading improves, but also navigation and accessibility.
By Someone1234 2026-01-1418:524 reply Indeed. That's why, when they finally kill old.reddit, I may legitimately stop using it entirely. They've already banned most of the good apps, forcing the pretty terrible official one.
By Hammershaft 2026-01-1423:552 reply New reddit is a travesty. It feels a satirical mockery of modern webdev
By ceejayoz 2026-01-151:40 My favorite feature is how you click a reply notification and it takes you to a page that doesn’t show the reply half the time.
By ChocolateGod 2026-01-156:45 And 6 years later it's still as terrible.
I've got a pet theory that old.reddit is actually codified in legal language somewhere as "must always exist."
Otherwise, I can't believe Reddit is actually keeping it around out of the goodness in their cold, dead corporate heart.
By yencabulator 2026-01-1521:311 reply Let's try this one: Reddit is selling "we'll let your AI training scrape our data" and have lazily implemented it by just pointing at old.reddit.com.
By yencabulator 2026-01-1616:57 Oh I'm not saying it was created for that. I'm saying that could be why it's still alive.
By bcraven 2026-01-1421:03 RedReader is a lovely, lightweight Android app for Reddit.
Development is slow, but I've been happily using it since RiF was killed.
Recently the old reddit szopped working for me even after going to account settings and opting out of new design again (it was already marked as being opt out) across all my devices. Even after manually navigating to old.reddit.com, clicking any link would take me to new again. I had to install special extensions to reroute to old reddit everywhere.
By Centigonal 2026-01-1420:41 Same thing happened to me, this fixed it: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/1odehgj/is_old_reddit...
By birdman3131 2026-01-1422:19 Had that happen a few times but switching the use old reddit box off and back on fixes it.
CBC News has a lite version of their news site that they tend to promote around times of natural disaster.
By mrkstu 2026-01-1420:17 By kamcma 2026-01-1420:08 NPR has one too: https://text.npr.org
By psyonity 2026-01-157:03 The dutch news (NOS) has their Teletext available via ssh on teletekst.nl.
no lite version as far as I know.
> but also navigation and accessibility
Counterpoint, HN is notoriously hard to use on mobile (still better than some, but it's clearly designed for desktop, and not super responsive).
But agreed, that's independent of the slim nature of the webpage (which is still possible with a good mobile UX).
I've found HN pretty easy to use with both Chrome and Firefox on Android, at default zoom, with my own pocket supercomputer.
Sometimes I manage to hit the updoot or downdoot buttons incorrectly, but that error happens so rarely that I'm amazed at my success.
Responsiveness is very good, as well. Loading is lightning quick in all but the very worst network environments.
It's not perfect by any means (the text box I'm writing this into really should be resizeable, for instance), but it's not bad at all...for me.
By yerushalayim 2026-01-166:12 Reader mode is nearly a must for me. Our eyes need a break.
HN in reader mode would be a such hugh blessing!
I dont get this. HN is probably one of the easiest sites i regularly use on mobile.
By Scoundreller 2026-01-156:47 The uptoot and downtoot buttons are a liiiiitle too close to eachother tho
By bigfatkitten 2026-01-1422:45 I find it works perfectly on Safari on iPhone.
> Counterpoint, HN is notoriously hard to use on mobile
No it's not, it's perfect on Vanadium with the zoom set to 125%. Much better than some bloated Javascript monstrosity.
It's very frustrating whenever this topic comes up that people see no middle ground between "the website as it is right now" and "some bloated JavaScript monstrosity". There is lots of room for improvement that would not turn it into "a bloated JavaScript monstrosity". How about bigger touch targets? Half the time when I go to vote on a comment on mobile I vote in the wrong direction and have to undo it. Same goes for using the search feature: I constantly fat-finger the drop-down search options on mobile.
Even though I usually prefer mobile websites to apps, most of the time for HN I browse using Octal instead of the website because the website is such a pain. And it wouldn't take very much to make it better, which makes it so annoying that people have knee-jerk anger to the prospect every time the subject comes up.
> How about bigger touch targets?
And lose even more precious space for reading? No thanks. Zoom in before you vote if it's a problem for you. You might say "how about drag up/down?" but then you can't scroll reliably on the page.
By Dylan16807 2026-01-150:16 There's all this blank space to the left of the comment. Some of that could be used for bigger arrows.
Or some of the buttons on a comment could be hidden until you tap the comment. (And you can do it in CSS if div toggle is an offensive amount of javascript.)
There are some low-hanging fruit that would make the experience better. It's fine but it's not great.
The Octal app has better touch targets on mobile and manages to show more text at the same time. Here’s a pair of screenshots from my iPhone of the top of the “Is Rust Faster than C” comments. [0] is mobile Safari, [1] is Octal. The app shows more text.
This is exactly what makes me nuts about this whole debate: the complete lack of empiricism or nuance. People would rather just have their knee-jerk outrage about JavaScript or web design fads, instead of actually checking whether the things they’re saying are true.
By coryrc 2026-01-1522:10 The font is bigger in your first example, the text uses twice the space (or your screenshots are different resolutions?). I greatly prefer it because it's easier to read. You could zoom out if you want, I guess.
But you could move the arrows to be to the right of the [-] and space them out a bit, sure, so they're easier to touch.
Anything that would introduce any amount of unneeded Javascript would make HN worse. It's the cancer of the modern Web. The current design shows that it isn't needed at all.
By graemep 2026-01-1514:20 You do not need JS to make some things (vote arrows, for example) bigger on mobile, just CSS.
By yandroid 2026-01-156:39 I'm using the "Glider" app for Android to access HN and its pretty awesome
By kiwijamo 2026-01-1422:45 Agreed. To upvote I often zoom out to make sure I tap the upvote botton and no the downvote one!
Maybe someone can build a service that translates webpages into "reader mode" format, which you can then consume on mobile devices with low bitrates.
By Marsymars 2026-01-150:19 That's effectively what Opera Mini did. (And apparently still does, I had no idea it was still functional.)
By yencabulator 2026-01-1521:361 reply So is Manifest v2 ad blocking and plenty of people are screaming about killing that one.
For a proper HN technical-solutions-only response, have the rewrite functionality reside in a WASM module cached locally and run in the browser, with a transparency ledger proving everyone sees the same WASM modules. This way any MitM attempts by the service are reproducible and undeniable.
By fc417fc802 2026-01-163:511 reply v2 is not a MitM concern (but it is a malicious code concern). Before quibbling about this consider that if v2 qualifies as a MitM concern then pretty much every other piece of software also does. That isn't in keeping with the spirit of the term.
The outrage is threefold, because there is no viable alternative, because it infantilizes users, trampling their agency, and because it clearly serves corporate interests at the expense of the user.
As to your proposed solution - the rewriting needs to happen on a separate device in order to avoid pushing extra data across the network. If you're already self hosting that service then there's no need for a transparency ledger.
By yencabulator 2026-01-164:09 It's auto updating JavaScript maintained by some unknown that can rewrite html on any page, how is that not an MitM risk?
The html itself is rarely a lot of data, most things in this space remove or resize images etc.
By bigfatkitten 2026-01-1422:44 If only we could make that conducive to resume-driven development for web developers.
By kevin_thibedeau 2026-01-1516:08 NoScript gets you part way there.
By nubg 2026-01-152:46 One more realistic option could be to have an "LLM browsing proxy" where you chat with an LLM via text, and it does the browsing and parsing and extracting, with links etc.
By gerad 2026-01-155:13 lol. It’s called Gemini.
By Dylan16807 2026-01-150:06 2G speeds are awful, and cell companies clearly want it that way since 3G plans throttled to "2G speeds" and 5G plans still usually throttle to "2G speeds".
Starlink is offering 1Mbps here, which is enough for a normal internet experience. It's enough to stream video at 480p or 720p depending on the exact content and encoding settings.
By qwertox 2026-01-1420:38 I've been listening to 32kbit radio streams while on a 64k falloff. It used to be an important feature for me, the 64k up and down. Sounds like nothing, but is usable.
By SergeAx 2026-01-1616:54 Telegram Messenger works fine at 2G (bar photos/videos, obviously). I was surprised by it. This is an upside of "building your own crypto" or the MTProto protocol, in their case.
By furyofantares 2026-01-1422:162 reply Yeah but it's all links to the other places.
By subscribed 2026-01-1513:10 TBH I read comments first and in 9/10 can
By furyofantares 2026-01-1520:54 Yeah I know. I think it's becoming somewhat of a problem though, people commenting without reading, or only skimming.
My thinking is that we're getting tons of bad articles now that it's so easy to make a bad article that, when skimmed, looks good, and is a good jumping off point for comments.
I think in the past it was somewhat high effort to make such an article, so most articles that look good when skimmed actually WERE pretty good. But now it's trivially easy to make an article that looks good when skimmed, and so we're getting a lot of articles whose only value is a jumping off point for comments.
By QuantumNomad_ 2026-01-1417:453 reply My mobile data plan is like this. It’s funny because when I’m “out of data” my provider sends an SMS suggesting I upgrade to more gigabytes, but then it still continues to work. And yes I checked my bills to make sure that they are not charging me for any usage excess of what’s included in the plan. It’s not even particularly slow. I can still browse the web, send and receive WhatsApp messages, images and videos, watch videos on TikTok etc.
My current plan is 2GB with rollover. Last month I used 2.5GB, and somehow this month has 2GB included + 2GB rollover = 4 GB available which by itself is also weird. Maybe most of the 2.5 GB I used last month was rollover from the month before that or something.
In total I have used 4.6 GB of mobile data so far this month, which is more than the 4 GB (2+2) I have available for this month and it’s still working.
There are still telcos offering 2GB plans. Wow. I’m on the cheapest plan and it comes with 400GB.
I always think by law any ISP that advertises speed and a has a cap must express the cap in terms of the advertised speed.
So telcos can advertise "Up to 200Mbps" for their package.
But then if they have a 2GB cap, they also need to say, "Caps at 80 seconds of usage".
Because that's what you're paying for at that speed, 80 seconds of usage per month.
Sure, you're not always (or indeed never) doing 200Mbps, but then you're not getting the speed you paid for.
By throawayonthe 2026-01-1419:021 reply i don't think that makes sense, most connections you make never reach 200Mbps because they don't need to
That's kind of my point, ISPs use that max speed in their advertising when it isn't really relevant, especially if it hits your cap in a minute or two.
It is relevant, though. I have 1.2 Gbps down with a 2 TB monthly cap. I've never hit the monthly cap even once, but by your standard I have "1.2 Gbps down for 3 hours, 42 minutes".
But that doesn't change the reality that it matters to me that a 20 GB video that a friend took at my wedding downloads in just 2 minutes rather than the ~30 minutes it would take if I had a 100 Mbps connection.
By eterm 2026-01-1421:35 Right, but 3+ hours of top speed per month is a lot, 80 seconds isn't.
Your cap is over 150 times that equivalent. If you had an 80 second hard cap, you couldn't even download that 20GB video.
By digiown 2026-01-152:11 1.2Gbps down but only 2TB cap? I hope that's really cheap since if I pay for that I'd expect to do stuff like downloading LLMs, etc, all the time.
By fleroviumna 2026-01-157:30 [dead]
By homebrewer 2026-01-1418:26 Shockingly to some, the level of network development, especially wireless network, is not the same everywhere. Even population density varies greatly. I just checked our operators, the cheapest mobile plan comes at 1 GiB of data per month. Prices climb really fast after that, making 10-15 GiB (or more) too expensive for many, though you can get 5 GiB/mo subsidized for cheap if you have some sort of disability.
Cheapest plan here in Romania is 75 GB for 2 euro/month, then the speed is limited to 1 Mbps.
By irishcoffee 2026-01-1422:201 reply Speed isn’t great, but that’s about 25% of “full speed” use over the course of a month, 600k seconds. Considering sleep is about 30% of a month as well, and assuming you’re not on a phone all day while working, it might be hard to hit that cap. Speed isn’t great, to reiterate. The cost is 30x cheaper than what I pay, and my speed, at my house, is 10mbps. No cap, but I use like 5gb/month.
Or am I way off and you hit the cap every month?
By christina97 2026-01-150:002 reply I believe parent meant that 1 mbps is the speed AFTER you hit 75 GB per month.
By M95D 2026-01-157:26 Yes, that what I meant. The 75 GB are unlimited, "best effort". When the 75 GB are consumed, speed is limited to 1 Mbps with no other limit or cost.
By irishcoffee 2026-01-154:39 Oh wow, that's an insane deal.
By lisdexan 2026-01-1420:19 More datapoints in USD (Chile) from checking various companies:
150GB-200GB ~15 USD
400GB-450GB ~19-20 USD
Unlimited (without throttling) ~21-27 USD
This is the price after the new client ~20% discount expires (generally 6 months). The unlimited and higher tier usually include stuff like Amazon Prime Videos subscriptions, local IPTV or roaming gigs. All plans obviously include calls and texting.
By cbm-vic-20 2026-01-1418:201 reply Data point: I'm in the US on an old pre-paid plan that gets me 5GB per month at fast speed, dropping down to unlimited "2G" speed after that cap is hit, which I've done only twice in the past 12 years. $30 per month, and I always "bring my own device" (ie, I only buy unlocked phones, not through the carrier). I haven't shopped around for a while.
You should shop around! Some of the MVNOs are offering unlimited fast data at a similar price these days, and something similar to what you have now for cheaper.
Yeah I'm on Verizon (via their Visible MVNO) and its ~$23/mo for unlimited data. Zero complaints on coverage or speeds.
By ssl-3 2026-01-1423:37 Visible here, as well. I've been paying $25.00 per month, flat (no extra fees/taxes) for years.
It's perhaps worth noting for others that there are 3 different tiers of service with Visible, ranging from $25 to $45 -- although all 3 are "unlimited."
(I can't tell the difference between them, myself, with my phone in my use.)
By simonbw 2026-01-1419:58 I second this! I switched to mint recently. They are offering unlimited data including hotspot for $15/mo for up to a year if you prepay. I think then it goes to their standard rate which is $30/mo for unlimited, or $15/mo for 5gb.
Not sponsored or anything, just a happy customer.
MVNO's for life. Weird how they haven't cannibalize their providers yet with such pricing.
By mikeocool 2026-01-1516:54 Yeah, I feel like the major providers must be coasting on people who just dont bother looking into it and ares till on the same $100 plan they've been on forever (this was me until recently) and people who really want new flagship phones all the time but can't afford them outright, so they finance with a postpaid plan.
By heraldgeezer 2026-01-154:51 They are often owned by the providers themselves.
By whateveracct 2026-01-1418:49 I'm in WA - I pay $20/mo for 15GB on Mint Mobile. I used to do $15/mo for 5GB but kept sometimes bumping into it (tethering and stuff) so I just bit the bullet and upgraded.
USA, paying $15/month for the cheapest T-Mobile plan. I only use a few hundred MB per month typically.
By tacon 2026-01-150:26 I got Connect by T-Mobile a few years ago when it was $10/mo prepaid ($11.03 with tax), and I am grandfathered in. It has a hard cap of 1GB/mo, then nothing. Then I got Hello Helium with a physical SIM on my exercise phone (out in the rain, at the gym) and it is completely free with ... wait for it ... 3GB/mo of data. Go figure. The Hello Helium app used to require location permission on at all times, but they eliminated that.
By tuesdaynight 2026-01-1418:09 I imagine they are not from USA. But it's a surprisingly low plan, even considering that
They'd rather you keep paying monthly than start price comparing options.
By dzhiurgis 2026-01-152:19 Even ChatGPT struggles to compare prices between local power providers. Partly because TOU differences, but a lot of time because providers straight up won't provide kWH rate. Add solar, battery and ability to shift patterns (solar charging EV, hot water automation) and it's a huge mess.
By heraldgeezer 2026-01-154:481 reply Where do you live?
And are you poor?
My 40GB plan is 12$ a month.
By QuantumNomad_ 2026-01-1514:381 reply I spend 90% of my time at home working (WFH) or relaxing or doing hobbies or sleeping, so most of my Internet use is via the WiFi. I chose one of the cheapest mobile data plans because I don’t need all that much mobile data when I already have Internet at home.
As long as I can still browse a little bit on the go, use WhatsApp to send and receive messages, photos, and videos, and I can watch a few TikTok and YouTube videos on the go, I’m happy.
My 2GB/month mobile data plan costs 179 NOK per month (~17.71 USD/month), plus I pay an extra monthly charge to use eSIM instead of physical SIM.
By heraldgeezer 2026-01-1515:31 And I thought Swedish prices was bad. I got in on Fello (Telia MVNO) triple data offer, for like 1 weekend only, that's why it's so cheap.
Chilimobil seems to be the cheapest in Norway looking around, 1GB for 119, 2GB for 139, 6GB for 199 20GB for 249. Also unlimited plans capped on speed.
I have been using 5-10GB a month on my plan. (Cant use WIFI at work)
Anyway =￣ω￣=
By frognumber 2026-01-1417:341 reply Years ago, I picked cell carrier because of this. When I ran out, it switched to O(200kbps), which is fine for email, basic web search, etc.
It was actually a bit ironic that, at the time, you could burn through the whole high-speed quota in seconds or minutes, if you went to the wrong web page. Most carriers would stop or bill you an arm-and-a-leg after.
5G data roaming is hilarious for this. Verizon offered 500MB of high speed data roaming per day in Canada before throttling down to ~128kbps. I ran one single speedtest in the middle of Ottawa on Rogers 5G, didn't even finish the speedtest (hitting an error at the end that it failed), and got the text message going "You've run out of high speed data today. Do you want to buy another 500MB for $5?"
At least it's 2GB/day now. And my 5G roaming is off...
By londons_explore 2026-01-1422:302 reply Roaming in some countries is like $10,000/gigabyte...
At that price, I dunno why they offer it at all. Are they just hoping to sue someone to get their whole house because they once watched some netflix overseas and forgot to use wifi?
By kalleboo 2026-01-152:11 They were deals that were made back in the WAP days where spending $1 a few times a day to check your business email made some semblance of sense, that then got neglected.
By simondotau 2026-01-158:54 Companies should be required by law to nominate an explicit "credit limit" for every account, and customers should be allowed to reduce it to whatever they want. Morally there's no difference between a credit card with a $5,000 credit limit, and a cell phone plan where you can rack up $5,000 in charges if you do the wrong thing.
By londons_explore 2026-01-1422:252 reply Thing is, the heaviest users are often the ones with some malware on their machine using up 100% of the bandwidth. When you limit that to 512kbps, thats still 129 gigabytes a month, on top of the 100 gigabytes a month you let the user use at high speed. When a typical user might use just 10 gigabytes a month, it seems dumb to let one user use 23x what everyone else is paying for/using, especially when that user is most likely just malware infected and not even personally benefiting!
A better limit I think is to limit the user to 10 kbps over a rolling 24h window, 100 kbps over a rolling 1h window, 1Mbits over a rolling 1 minute window, and 10 Mbits over a 1 second window. That way they can quickly check an email or load a web page... But it quickly slows down if they try to (ab)use it for hours on end.
By Dylan16807 2026-01-150:36 It's not like 100GB is some huge amount of data. It's easy to hit, so if we're judging the overage amount we should be comparing it to the full 100GB, not some made up guy that only uses 10GB. There are users on unlimited consuming many terabytes, and they're not paying all that much more. It's not unfair to anyone if the cheaper plan is able to slowly reach 200GB or 300GB in a minimal-impact way.
Also dropping all the way to 10kbps with enough use would just suck. It's effectively unusable and it would be extreme penny-pinching to make sure the maximum 24/7 user can't squeak out more than 3GB extra on their 100GB plan. You get more variance than that from different month lengths.
> it seems dumb to let one user use 23x what everyone else is paying for/using
Bandwidth is use-it-or-lose-it. If nobody else was using it, then it doesn't hurt anything. And during high demand traffic shaping hopefully gives their traffic even lower priority.
By londons_explore 2026-01-156:491 reply > If nobody else was using it, then it doesn't hurt anything.
On networks I manage, there are clients who pay for large quantities of super low priority capacity - eg. for moving scientific data around, or backing up stuff that only needs to complete sometime in the next 30 days.
That means there is no such thing as unused bandwidth - almost every link is 100% full of paying customers data, and anyone using more displaces one of those low priority customers.
By coryrc 2026-01-1618:23 Over wireless?
By bigfatkitten 2026-01-1422:411 reply Starlink’s plans vary between markets, but in Australia they have a dirt cheap ($8 AUD per month or something) standby plan that gives you unlimited data capped at something like 500Kbps. If you’re going on a trip and need faster data, you can upgrade to a bigger plan for the rest of the billing month, charged on a pro rata basis, and then revert to the standby plan afterwards.
I used to use Inmarsat BGAN. BGAN would top out at around 250Kbps on a good day, and cost a few bucks per MB on a terminal that cost almost ten times as much as a Starlink Mini.
By killingtime74 2026-01-1422:53 I tried this and it's actually even enough to play YouTube at 1080p after some initial buffering. Calls definitely work
By olyjohn 2026-01-152:14 I leave my Starlink Mini in Standby Mode, which is $5/mo and is capped at 500KB/sec. I got the dish for free because I'm already a subscriber at home, so adding the $5/mo really isn't a big deal. It's perfect to go camping, because I might want to let my friends know that I had to move campsites, but I don't want to sit there and surf all day long and watch YouTube. Though 500KB/sec is more than enough to do all of that...
As a residential customer Starlink gave me the unlimited slow speed with a free mini for $60/year, as a tease to promote the full speed at $300/year. But it does everything I need it to, so I'm not incentivized to upgrade. I can listen to YouTube audio, make voip calls, download map tiles or talk with a chatbot without limitations. It's a large quality of life improvement for me because in my rural area there is no cellular connection during most of my driving.
By bscphil 2026-01-1421:04 I do think it's vastly superior to preferential treatment for some traffic, which seems to be the most popular alternative. The one caveat is that ISPs need to be forced to be transparent about this. Often, with cell providers, it's "Unlimited 5G" advertised, with a tiny asterisk pointing to even tinier disclaimer text at the bottom explaining that they throttle your rates once you hit a (fairly low) cutoff. That type of misleading marketing undercuts the fairness of the offer.
By Lvl999Noob 2026-01-158:29 My internet providers (both home wifi and cellular) do this. The problem with unlimited slow speed is that it's too slow. I am sometimes unable to open the carrier's own app and pay for a recharge. Either the app just doesn't open or the transaction in the payments app fails.
By Waterluvian 2026-01-151:12 Mobile has been like this for me for like a decade or so. But in the before times it was just barbaric and ridiculous to either be cut off or absolutely ravaged by fees.
By dyauspitr 2026-01-1418:46 Have they quantified the slow speed? Because when I had Viasat the slow speed so so unbelievably slow it had a hard time loading a regular SPA page in 2-3 minutes.
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.
By AdamJacobMuller 2026-01-154:04 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.
By reactordev 2026-01-1417:302 reply Mmmmm ISDN copper…
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 :)
ISDN (IDSL) was max 144 kbit/s. Two 64 kbit/s channels and one 16 kbit/s control channel all bundled together.
By reactordev 2026-01-1420:34 Or four bonded twin-64kbit channels with a multiplexer. Ahhh, high school…
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.
By reactordev 2026-01-151:23 I was in Northern Virginia at the time enjoying this new thing called AOL.
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)
By rootusrootus 2026-01-1516:32 The standby account -is- 500 kbps, probably it's the same mode, so I'd expect the same performance.
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.
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.
By hinkley 2026-01-1418:37 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.
By SkyPuncher 2026-01-1417:141 reply 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.
By happyopossum 2026-01-1417:351 reply > 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).
By umanwizard 2026-01-1417:422 reply Shouldn’t it actually be KB or even KiB?
By BuildTheRobots 2026-01-1417:551 reply If we're playing actually, then it's a speed not a quota, so whatever the correct value it should be suffixed with "per second".
By umanwizard 2026-01-1421:18 Good point!
By vardump 2026-01-1419:38 K is for Kelvin, so probably not. kB or KiB, depending on intent.
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.
Is Google homepage consisting of a text input field and like ten buttons really over a megabyte? Damn.
By mlyle 2026-01-1420:15 I end up transferring 940kB (with a lot of blocking cranked up). Typing "hello" in the search bar takes it up to 1MB. Then the first page of search results is another 1.3MB.
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...)
By NitpickLawyer 2026-01-1417:311 reply > 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.
By wat10000 2026-01-1417:56 Unfortunately, the 56kbps internet was a lot more usable. I've been on 256kbps cellular connections (T-Mobile free international roaming) and it works, but it's pretty bad. Everything takes way more data these days, and nobody thinks about slow connections when writing software so there are a ton of overly aggressive timeouts and bad UI that assume operations won't take more than few seconds.
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)
> 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.
By mlyle 2026-01-1421:45 Data rates are almost always multiplied by powers of 10, because they're based on symbol/clock rates which tend to be related to powers of 10. There's no address lines, etc, to push us to powers of 2 (though we may get a few powers of 2 from having a power of 2 number of possible symbols).
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".
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.
By rootusrootus 2026-01-1516:36 I need to go improve my knowledge, I haven't paying enough attention to the options lately, and I experience the same phenomenon -- I have a few workstations along with some IoT trash and Starlink standby mode pegs just from the chatter from the devices. As you say, on WiFi they don't bother controlling themselves and they are constantly finding things to do.
I lived with 2.7KBPS
- 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
This is fine if you're the sort of person who knows about IRC, is satisfied with content on Gopher, etc.
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.
By anthk 2026-01-168:36 You can use whatsapp over IRC->Bitlbee and reading newspapers at least for text mode. Privilege? more like the reverse. There are phone data plans for $10 that upon finishing your monthly data, you got throttled like that until the next month.
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.
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.
By danpalmer 2026-01-152:33 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.
By gramie 2026-01-153:51 > 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).
By doublerabbit 2026-01-1418:12 Good enough to play Quake 3 Arena.
By Sammi 2026-01-1418:21 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.
By natch 2026-01-151:11 Fortunately 1. For slow speeds, it’s not like you have to live with that slowness every day. The impact is limited to the remaining few days of the month where you ran up against the 100GB, so the either-or in your statement looks worse than it is; and 2. Starlink makes it dead easy to switch from plan to plan right in the app so you can go right back to a lower plan when the higher one is not needed. With the caveat that they do change what plans are available sometimes as we’re seeing here.
By ralfd 2026-01-1418:07 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.
By lukevp 2026-01-151:25 Wait, the price didn’t change though did it? So you get 100 gigs for the price of 50 before?
Unrelated to the conversation, but the post title was something like "Starlink roam 50GB is now 100GB and unlimited slow speed after that", then a minute later it's now "Roam 50GB is now Roam 100GB".
Was this change made by a mod or OP, and why would someone making that change? I do think the original title was more descriptive, and the new title was completely out of context, or it's imply that everyone is using Starlink and know what's Roam 50GB is.
The guidelines[0] state:
> ...
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
By nine_k 2026-01-1423:50 I would say that omitting the crucial detail about the unlimited slow speed access is pretty misleading. It's a difference between needing to set up a fallback channel, and not, which halves the complexity.
By huydotnet 2026-01-1517:26 I think this is one of the cases where strictly applying the guideline fails the reader, but yeah, I can see that this guideline make sense most of the (other) cases.
By Dylan16807 2026-01-1423:52 They changed two things and the title only has one of the things, so personally I think that's 'misleading' enough to append the rest.
By csto12 2026-01-1420:47 I believe there is a rule where the HN title should mirror the article’s title
By _vqpz 2026-01-1422:13 I guess the idea is that the Starlink URL is displayed after the title so it's redundant, but it definitely makes it impossible to understand at first glance if you're unfamiliar with Starlink service names
By galkk 2026-01-1421:00 Yes, this is weird title change.
By taschmex 2026-01-1422:14 The HN website shows the host part of the URL right next to the title, so it says "Roam 50GB is now Roam 100GB (starlink.com)", but it looks strange in my RSS reader
If I were to guess, probably because Musk achieved self-fulfilling prophecy of hate and discriminatory handling against him, and now any obviously him related content gets massive, organic, figurative, score penalties.
Tesla and SpaceX posts used to routinely hit the top spots and accumulate thousands of comments here, now they hardly stay an hour on the first page. Someone on the Internet's first headphone amp is now considered more important to people here than the world's largest rocket flying, if that comes with Musk attached.
Obviously as anybody knows, that's how `hate` actually works: silent exclusion, not posturing. But that was what they advocated for years, so, here's my slow claps...
