Arkana

Starlink announced a $5/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.