I'm on an ship doing oceanographic survey work in the arctic. StarLink is $5000 for 5 TB. Without it, we're on iridium, which both eye-wateringly expensive and slow (1MB up and down). Low bandwidth mode would be hella appreciated right now.

Interestingly, one of the major sucks for these LEO systems does not appear to be bandwidth. It's the route. We throttled the ship down to 2 Mbps for a while (100 pax) and Google properties are actually quite snappy while everything else is dead slow to the point of timing out. Turns out Google arranged to have Starlink ground stations installed in their data centers. That takes off a lot of hops. Amazon was one of the few other things that would load.

I hate to sound like a shill for big tech, but I get the sense Google and Amazon actually give a shit about speed. When you measure your bandwidth bill in billions, you can afford to?