> Are there really many situations where a 10kbps connection would actually be stable enough to be usable? Yes (most likely: that was an intuited “yes” not one

> Are there really many situations where a 10kbps connection would actually be stable enough to be usable? Yes (most likely: that was an intuited “yes” not one born of actually checking facts!). There are many places still running things over POTS rather than anything like (A)DSL, line quality issues could push that down low and even if you have a stable 28kbit/s you might want to do something with it at the same time as the audio comms. Also, you may be trying to cram multiple channels over a relatively slow (but stable) link. Given the quality of the audio when calling some support lines I suspect this is very common. Furthermore, you might find a much faster unstable connection with a packet-loss “correcting” transport layered on top effectively producing a stable connection of much lesser speed (though you might get periods of <10kbit here due to prolonged dropouts and/or have to institute an artificial delay if the resend latency is high).