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).

Shouldn’t it actually be KB or even KiB?

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".

Good point!

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.

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...)

> 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.

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.

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".