When I worked on oil rigs in Saudi Arabia, ~300kbps seemed to be the minimum necessary for WhatsApp/Facebook messenger/low-intensity web browsing like old reddi

When I worked on oil rigs in Saudi Arabia, ~300kbps seemed to be the minimum necessary for WhatsApp/Facebook messenger/low-intensity web browsing like old reddit or arstechnica. HN might work a little lower but probably not much before HTTP fails for other reasons (if your speeds are that low, likely your packet loss is far too high to keep things working over 2G/3G/4G). Truly even 0.3Mbps made all the difference in the world to the people who had been stuck on those rigs for the past 30-800 days. Often it was the first time in over a week, sometimes over a month that they could talk with their families. It became a necessary part of my job to spend 6-12 hours/day rationing access to the WiFi hotspots so that each of the 60 or so personnel could talk with their families each day. I purchased with my own money all the WiFi modems and a set of 8 different antennas for various frequencies, with very long cables. Generally took about 2-6 hours to align everything correctly to get any usable signal. Used public cell tower databases to find the GPS coordinates of the nearest towers and used vectors to those positions as starting points. Some of the locations I never could get any signal and no one could talk to their families or keep up with the news. Hopefully Starlink eventually connects these people to their families on a much more regular basis.