Where I live, you can get 4G simcard with stable 64kB/s speed cap with solid coverage for a price of a small doner kebab, to keep it online it costs a price of a pack of gummies a year, it's a semi-eternal internet. I went for it because I didn't understand the nuance between 512kbits and 512kB/s, 512kbits is 64kB/s, to put it in perspective a 200mb download takes an hour of your entire bandwith. It was quite a bad deal as I later found.
It turns out that because of a quite competetive market between a handful of providers and a good general standard of internet access in my country you can squeeze out a really great deal for almost nothing. Nowadays I am online on a 4G full speed mobile internet with a 500gb datacap with a year to spend it, it cost me as much as a pack of gummies, I have 2 more of those that are not yet activated, so I in reality I have 1500gb to use at a leisurely pace (they expire if not activated by late 2027).
Nevertheless I am stubborn as a mule and computer semi-literate so I want to explore how internet is on 64kB/s in 2025.
Despite all that will be written here, using 2025 internet with 2002 speeds in fact often gets miserable, not everything can be mitigated, you can only download 2gb with 64kB/s overnight, it's just not enough.
AI models are 10+gb per download, 720p has 3-4 times bigger bitrate than your internet has bandwidth, videocalls won't work (audiocalls might), streaming anything for others is just off the table, some great video content can't be accessed comfortably.
New AAA games can be up to 100gb, old AAA games are still 10gb+, even well repacked indie games often can get over 2gb, legit ways to access games are not flexible enough, only piracy is workable.
Listening to standard-format music online will eat up half of your bandwidth, doubling the (already obscene) loadtimes on everything.
It's not for the faint of heart.
!woof! (\ /\ △△ >\│ ) /// | \ // ╓ ╥ ─^^^^─────ₙ. /// / \// @ /ì ] \_//ⁿ\ ] ▐ \ ] )\┬> ___-\ / )┼ :√ )┼\ │ ^/ :: ^/ :: // :: // :: _// ¡:_// ¡: (_) ♪;_) ♪; (_) (_) a cute doggie to aid you on your journey ! into the world of a really slow internet !
I would recommend using linux, moreover I would recommend using wayland and I do recommend against using snap, snap is unwieldy and downloads updates unasked/nags you to update, unistalling it is possible and reccomended if you want to use ubuntu. Wayland is needed for waydroid, a fantastic low-resource translation layer (works like an emulator of an android system but 10x faster) for android apps. I use xubuntu which has both snaps, and uses x11 which means there was some scripting and trickery involved in having waydroid run (a weston session that instantly runs waydroid on a script is not that hard but it took few hours to figure out).
Windows is much less malleable and if it decides to send/download some metaanalitics randomly it might be rough, also all android emulators on windows are very resource intensive. It's possible to mark the network you are using as mobile and windows will calm down with using internet willy-nilly and predownloading updates, I tested out some things on 64kB/s on windows and after toggling that option it was ok.
Linux native cli apps like wget, nethogs, apt are also really useful and resiliant to bad internet, I am sure you can get the same functionality on windows but I don't know how.
Saw a post where someone talked about his internet and how he was using 64kB/s unstable connection and he used a ssh into a VPS for a ssh based webview, Browsh/Carbonyl a headless entire full browser on the VPS scanned the site, converted it to an image preserving the position of the text, the image then got converted to colorful letters and sent over to the ssh terminal, after the whole operation he got a full text terminal tile-view of a browser with letters where letters ought to be, supposedly super fast and comfy on terrible internet, BUT prerequisite is an VPS which is more expensive than fast 4g practically unlimited ""simcard internet"" (using up all bonuses and then discrading a simcard every month) in most countries. He also mentioned about using a VPS to download anything he wanted to watch (for example his youtube subscriptions exported to an RSS) and compress it a lot on the server and then download it overnight or if it's small enough instantly.
Maybe something like that would be feasible but leeching off of google colab resources, depending on what you do google colab without a gpu will let you do 10+ hours of that kind of thing browsh browsing per day, silly. Leeching off of google colab to experiment with medium-sized text AI models through koboldcpp is fun, for people who like it vibecoding through lmarena also might be fun, LLMs of all varieties are on the table but not locally, and I feel dirty after using them for something worthwhile, I do like booting up a short adventure CYOA generated by an LLM here and there.
You are a knight living in the kingdom of Larion. You have a steel longsword and a wooden shield. IYKYK
Considering my parents have a great wifi and I visit them semimonthly, I conciser hooking up a small SAMBA server that I will download stuff into a 64gb unused USB drive I have and swap it every time I'm there with an empty one, idea for sending my big downloads somewhere else. (silly, probably not worth it!)
tor is a cesspool I don't want to go there but sites are optimized there because tor bandwidth is limited by it's private design and routing through handful of servers, for sure there are fun privacy/IT wikis and blogs there (probably not fun enough to risk stumbling across illegal pornography or some gruesome gore)
Torrents are something I didn't explore, should be a very worthwhile on such an intenret, especially torrent-streaming of 360p shows might be something that works neat.
Considering other untested and silly ideas internet back in the olden days was really slow, in the 2006ish 1-2mbit/s was the higher-end, and something like 512kbit/s (64kB/s) was more standard, it's not like entirety of the old internet vanished, not sure how to access it gainfully.
I read a lot of unicorn jelly a 2002 webcomic on this 64kB/s internet, this site's styling is inspired by it, webcomics will manage the internet constraints really well for the most part, there are also archives of the ultra old internet, like the old text-file archives from bbses and old newsgroup archives to scour are online but its a wasteland.