| Carmack's comments and the comments in the thread entirely surprise me. 256kbit/s was pretty much the standard ADSL speed 20 years ago. I remember thinking it was lucky some of my friends had 512kbit/s and 1500kbit/s was considered extremely fortunate. Even still calls over Skype worked fine, you could run IRC or MSN Messenger while loading flash games or downloading MP3s. You could definitely play games like Starcraft, Age of Empires, Quake, UT2004, etc. on a 256k ADSL line. Those plans were also about 8x the price of this plan, not even adjusting for inflation. Not only that, those lines were typically only 64k upload speed. The usefulness of a 500kbit/s up/down line is incredibly high. I think the only reason it might seem less useful now is that web services are not typically optimised to be usable on dial-up speeds like they were 20 years ago. With the right setup and having feeds/content download asynchronously rather than "on-demand", 500kbit/s is still plenty of internet by today's standards. |