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A comment on Starlink Direct to Cell. Parent comment

Re:Starlink Direct to Cell by kelnos on Wednesday October 11, 2023 @06:08PM (#37850931)
> For all the faults of Meta, WhatsApp seems to be the only company that cares about people with bandwidth measured in kbps, sometimes fractions thereof.

WhatsApp was built with low-bandwidth/high-latency/high-packet-loss in mind well before Meta acquired them.

I suppose we can give them vague amounts of credit for not making those use cases worse since the acquisition.

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Re:Starlink Direct to Cell by londons_explore on Wednesday October 11, 2023 @06:22PM (#37851090)
They have made it worse...

It used to work just fine on 1kbps.

Now it is pretty much unusable over dialup or GPRS.

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Re:Starlink Direct to Cell by lxgr on Wednesday October 11, 2023 @08:42PM (#37852186)
To be fair, it used to be "encrypted" using a scheme not too far removed from ROT13; now it's using the Signal protocol, which probably requires quite a few more bytes per message.

For example, messaging a contact with multiple devices connected means that your phone has to encrypt your message to each of their clients independently.

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