As a happy Starlink customer for the past 12 months -- and who uses it primarily for video conference, remote desktop, browsing, and similar -- I'm very happy with any policy change that improves the performance of my service by reducing the impact from people currently abusing the service.
Yes, it was sold as an 'all you can eat' service, and yes, there were no such constraints previously, but pragmatically there's finite limits with satellite services, and equally, you're going to always get customers coming in and 'taking the piss' out of these services.
It's hard to not get a tad grumpy when your modest Citrix session at 300kbps is throttled because it's competing against 25Mbps streaming video (and you just know that plenty of those are the weird 'have the TV on in the background all day' people).
It would be a huge stretch to characterize usage over 1TB a month as abuse. My family likely rips through 1TB of data in about 10 days if I had to estimate. So some sort of throttling after 5TB would be more appropriate for 30 days, as obviously a main use case for Starlink will just be normal family internet usage which means a hell of a lot of video.
Unless you are streaming multiple 4K movies per day I just don't see how that's possible. I have a family of 5 and my kids watch several hours of Disney+ and YouTube per day, plus my wife and I watch an hour of Netflix after the kids go to bed, and on top of that I work from home and... I've never exceeded even 500GB in one month.
Working from home contributes, but another big contributor is the Nintendo Switch and Steam. Both of them are constantly pulling down big game updates. If you have a PS5 or Xbox, it would be a similar situation if you own a decent sized game library.
Until now Starlink was advertising speeds as 50–200 Mbps. On the low side that is competitive with VDSL2 FTTC. On the high side, that's faster than the packages most users take out on FTTP*
* In the UK, anyway, by far most FTTP users take out entry level packages. These packages often coincide with FTTC speed tiers; if they don't, 100 or 150Mbps is the highest entry level tier.
I dont know what UK VDSL2 is but in Canada if you're outside a city or town you spend $75/m on 20mbps that fails whenever it rains.
My friend who moved to a rural farm has been raving about how life-changing Starlink has been for him and he only lives 20 minutes outside a town with 40k people and 1.5hrs from a city with 4 million.
And we allegedly live in a country where gov subsidies justify the exorbitant ISP prices and allegedly rural people benefit from that... Where a free market wouldnt. Allegedly.
Yikes, that's appalling. VDSL is an evolution of ADSL. You can get speeds of 50-78 Mbps, depending on distance to cabinet, for under £30/month. Coverage isn't universal, but it sounds better than in Canada.
It's also interesting (but disappointing!) Canada's been let down by the telecoms regulator in an entirely different way. In the UK, BT was beginning to roll out fibre, but that was cancelled in favour of privatisation in 1984. Here we are nearly four decades later, and only now is FTTP being rolled out in earnest.
As noted, data usage after 11PM (until 7AM) isn't considered as part of your data utilization, so you can schedule any game updates between those times.
Most of the time, you aren't even playing the games actively, so you won't even notice the ~6h delay after patch release.
> So now when you buy a game you have to wait until your overnight download window opens to play it?
That's a very disingenuous interpretation of parent's suggestion.
My reading of their comment was that a) there's 1/3 of every day that's not covered by this quota / throttling allowance, and so b) it's easy to configure your game store download manager to pull game _patches_ during that window.
I guess AAA games are around the 50GB these days? If you're buying dozens of these each months, you may have some larger self-control issues to contend with.
Keep in mind we're talking about people using a nominally beta internet service that's got a minimum average ~50ms latency, at any point in talking to one of a thousand satellites.
People that are using Starlink tend to be here because there's no options, or really really really poor options (eg. geostationary satellite - which is what I was on previously, with its 150GB / month limit, 600ms latency, etc). Some appreciation for the fact these pipes are finite and shared is expected and assumed, much more so than urban internet users with nice fat terrestrial connections.
GP said you can schedule game updates for the 1/3 of each day that you're not metered.
P incorrectly translated that to 'when you buy a game you have to wait a day to play it'.
So, as I already argued, these are not the same thing -- purchase & download of a game (impulse) vs regular patches (easily scheduled out of hours), and for a new game it's entirely up to you if you want to pull that down immediately (a modest percentage of 1TB).
Just to be clear here, the reason that you feel that 1TB/30 days from a low orbit satellite ISP (a relatively recent technological development mind you) is insufficient is simply because your family happens to use 1TB/10 days on what is I assume a wired internet connection?
"How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago".
“How quickly the advertised-as-unlimited internet service he paid for owes him unlimited internet service he knew was deprioritized only 10 seconds ago.”
Let’s be real, they’re simply making a case that 1TB/mo is far from abuse as far as an unlimited, capless internet service should be concerned.
Did these starlink customers agree to a contract saying this could happen? Probably. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s a pretty low threshold* when compared to unlimited.
1 TB isn't a big amount tbh. Watch few youtube videos or 4k videos and you will reach 1 TB within 5-10 days. I live with 3 family member who continuously watches and we always cross 1 TB per month, so I don't think we are abusing the service.
That being said, I do understand it might be fair for starlink as it is a satelite internet.
What is “a few” videos. 20 minutes @4k is1gb per visit.
So you’re talking about 1000 videos in 5-10 days. Are you seriously watching 200-400 20 min videos per day?
That’s 4000-8000 minutes per day! Also you have to go through this outside of the nightly window.
That means you’re watching 66 hours of video every 16 hours.
Even if this was the case, then that’s literally the only thing your family does, and you should be happy that that can be covered with only $100 per month lol
What??? Anyone with a 4k TV that uses netflix is watching 4k a good portion of teh time. What does time with TV on matter? Plus, most new shows are in 4k including kids shows.
Anyone with a 4K TV who has the premium subscription, and has manually changed their settings.
From Netflix:
Basic ($8.99 per month): Standard definition (480p) content on a single screen at a time.
Standard ($12.99 per month): High definition (up to 1080p) content on two screens at a time.
Premium ($15.99 per month): Ultra HD (up to 4K) content on four screens at a time.
Some people complain about the 4K quality.
From Netflix:
High definition (HD) 720p: 3 Mbps
Full high definition (FHD) 1080p: 5 Mbps
4K/Ultra HD (UHD) 4K: 15 Mbps
So 1 hour of 4K video is 60x60x15/8 = almost 7GB
That's 142 hours of watching Netflix (outside the nightly window) almost 5 hours per day. I can assure you Netflix doesn't make that much good stuff
I can confirm that my wife and kid easily blow through 500 gigs a month just watching TV. The wife likes to leave the news channel on all day, and I don't think that's a ghastly, unheard-of, abusive thing to do with a TV
If I leave any games on auto-update and work from home all month, we get pretty close to Comcast's 1.2TB cap every month
The cap-free usage at night is nice, though. Assuming we don't all start streaming 3D point cloud videos or meshes and textures any time soon, that should keep the service comfortably usable for a few people at a time all month.
> The wife likes to leave the news channel on all day, and I don't think that's a ghastly, unheard-of, abusive thing to do with a TV.
Are you using Starlink, or are you one of those people commenting on this thread about how much bandwidth you use on non-satellite services?
In any case, I understand that you don't think it's ghastly to leave 'TV on in the background all the time, every day', but please understand in return that the rest of us contending for the same network resources don't think this is reasonable.
> If I leave any games on auto-update and work from home all month, we get pretty close to Comcast's 1.2TB cap every month.
This sounds like this acceptable usage policy doesn't affect you at all, in any way.
Also, that you're unaware that your auto-update games download manager has a facility to schedule downloads at certain times of the day.
To bring things back around for you: You strongly implied that any household that uses a terabyte per month outside of late night hours is "abusing" the service. I'm just here to explain that you're wrong in your accusation.
It's very easy to hit that cap with a moderately-sized family doing normal things all month, no piracy needed.
You didn't answer my question - are you a Starlink customer, and are you impacted by this policy change?
> You strongly implied that any household that uses a terabyte per month outside of late night hours is "abusing" the service.
This is at best incomplete, or at worst incorrect.
I said that for the Starlink service people consuming excessive network bandwidth are abusing the service - because they're impacting the performance for 'normal' users -- a set that includes me.
If you're consuming more than 1TB on a service that isn't as physically restricted as a LEO satellite service, well good for you.
This story is about Starlink changing their terms and conditions to limit the impact of inconsiderate users.
Aside - my gut feel is that they're actually targeting the >10TB / month users, or some other relatively high threshold of really heavy & persistent users, but by simply stating a ceiling they're tacitly saying anything up to that volume is okay - and they don't want to normalise really large volumes, hence picking a 1TB figure.
I haven't had a recent console for quite a while, but can't you just set it to automatically download (not install) downloads at night? So many people are complaining (and rightly so) about having to wait before playing
The news is one situation a lot of people have it just on. Not much to do about that, even though they're repeating the same items over and over again.
Netflix asks you every few hours if you're still watching.
Would be great to have some sort of 'attention' detection, for example some gaze tracking camera in your tv, so it can automatically switch between SD and 4K, but also dim the backlight to save energy.
I'm just not sure if I would want a camera in my tv which checks if I actually look at it.
This is the bigger issue here. It's not about the limit, its about the bait and switch. And no, I don't accept arguments that people should know better, because if the customer is supposedly smart enough to know that limits were inevitable, then so did starlink, which means this was a deliberate tactic (I'd call it a grift tactic at that). The responsible approach would have been to start everyone on a fairly tight limit and then either expand it if the network could handle it, keep them if it couldn't, or just charge more for more bandwidth. That way customers could make a sound evaluation of value/cost.
Changing the ToS such that the top few percentile of people performing some seriously abnormal network activities, to ensure that the majority of your customer base remains happy with the service, is not grift.
'The sign said don't pee in the pool, it didn't say don't bring in bottles of pee you prepared at home and open them in the pool' is not a defence -- people should know better, and it was probably expected that some tiny number of customers would effectively ruin the 'unlimited' service for everyone was.
The responsible approach, as you misunderstood it, was to say 'Here are the T&C - we may change them at will, and shall notify you, at which point you can choose to cancel your service'.
Your pee example is not the same thing at all. There was no 'technicality' being breached by people using lots of bandwidth, they were doing so because that's EXACTLY what they paid for when the signed up for an 'UNLIMITED' plan.
A better example would be signing and paying for, a 2022 BMW, and instead getting a 2010 Kia. Sure it still drives, but it ain't the same thing.
Remote work from my van requires video conferencing, easily more than 200 hours per month. 1 TB would limit me to 5 GB per hour. I have been doing much more than that the last 5 months on Starlink.
I object to you calling that abuse. I certainly am not 'taking the piss' out of this service. I pay over 250 euro for Starlink (including 24/7 offgrid batteries and dish) so by suddenly limiting me to 1000 GB I now pay over 0,25 euro per GB.
I am in sparse regions where my satellites are not overtaxed (no cities nearby for 300 km).
If Starlink would equally trottle everyone in speed when the system is oversubscribed at peak times a day I would not mind as much, but a data cap throttles/limits me much more. And now I also have to start counting my traffic and set alarms (waking me up) to voluntairily limit my data.
or that 25 Mbps is the zoom video call to someone's mom dying of cancer's last words. Who knows? The service is oversold and overcapacity, as some predicted. Still better than dial up tho.
I am in video conferences all day every day, I easily burn through 1TB/mo without torrenting or warez. I use my internet to work. Throttling impedes my ability to earn.
Just for the sake of it I opened youtube video[0] at 1920@60 and capped the network to "Regular 4G/LTE" in Dev tools, which caps it at ~150KB/s (~1200Kbps). After a bit of stuttering I had a video without pre-buffering. Of course later, where the codec just can't compress enough it starts to buffer (part in the forest at 6:00), but that for a FullHD video at 60FPS with a very dynamic scene change.
If I were to watch these videos for 8h in a row it would be only 4GB a day or 86GB for 20d/m. FullHD video. At 60FPS.
Sure, video conferencing is a bit a different beast, because there is no way to compress a dynamic stream so effectively... Except if you don't run you conference from a Porsche 356 going through the woods then 90% of the picture is just walls of your room/office. It CAN run just fine with 1-4Mbps.
Hell, we had a good enough video calls in Skype almost two decades ago, on a meager DSL lines with 1-5/Mbps limit.
Like how Comcast starts charging you money for every $x megabytes over 1.2 TB. Only it makes sense for a wireless ISP like Starlink to do it due to spectrum bandwidth constraints. A wired ISP like comcast just does it to try to extract more money out of a userbase that has stopped growing.
True. But a very large number of dedicated physical transmission lines (ie, coaxial cable) allows you to re-use the same spectrum over and over for different groups. While propagating radio waves in free space means that everyone in line of sight has to share the one single spectrum.
This is besides the point but of course there's a number. You've never explored where that number is before? Of course, you're drinking some cheap shitty beer. It's an unlimited plan so you're not getting top shelf small batch IPA. It's some macro brew, let's say it's Budweiser. How many of those you think you can drink a day, every day, every month?
Lets say I charge you $300/month for "unlimited" Bud Light. No sharing with your friends, just all you can drink for $300. If retail is $1/beer, you'd only have to drink 10 beers/day for the deal to be worth it to you (every month only has 30 days to make the math easier), but let's say my costs are only .50's a beer because I'm buying in volume from a cheaper state, then you'd have to drink 20/day, or 600/month before I start losing money on the deal. Now remember, this is 20/day every day of the week for a month. Or 10/day on weekdays and 45 on Sat and Sun each, or almost 2/hr with no sleeping the whole weekend, every weekend.
Even if you think you can keep up that schedule, a bunch of your buddies joined as well. You think every one of them can also keep up? Because if someone wimps out and drinks 0 beers during the week, or skips any weekend, you've got to drink their portion in order for me to lose money on top of the 45 you're drinking a day. Anyway so you plug all that into a spreadsheet based on what you think you can get priced in volume after tax a state or two away, vs retail, and then figure out how many beers does a normal average person drink by themselves before they pass out.
Waddaya say? I'd feel bad if you die of cirrhosis but you did that to yourself.
ok, if we keep this analogue, i offer you **!!!! UNLIMITED !!!!** (vuvuzela noises here) beer for a month. however in the 67th page of my EULA i say, after you drank a gallon of beer this month, you have to use a really, i mean really really thin straw to drink beer for the rest of the month. done, sell me a bridge
Free and unlimited ? I had a water leak that took time to fix, I saw it on the bill, and the utility company too, fining me for "industrial-grade" usage. If you consume yourself more than everyone else in your building, someone will come do something about it eventually to make you stop.
I have a 1.2gbps connection with them. That costs $70/mo (with their new subscriber promotion). They give you a 1.2 TB data cap per month.
Every month I can use my connection at full speed for 8.79 seconds.
On the bright side I can pay $30/mo more for unlimited data.
edit: I have been informed that I am bad at math and the correct answer is actually 2.4 hours which does make me feel better, but it's still a funny comparison
No, it's not. A 1Gbps comcast connection would then need roughly a 5-10Mbps bandwidth cap if you wanted to ensure everybody could hammer the connection at the same time. A total data cap allows most people to use the connection at full 1Gbps speed whenever they want (because most people are only going to be hammering it on average no more than the data cap)
...while those who know they'll hammer it more than average have a specific idea of how much they can get away with.
It is an argument for de-prioritization. If you have blown past your 1T limit bu the rest of Comcast's network isn't too busy then it doesn't matter, but if the other people on your circuit want to use the data they get priority over your traffic.
It isn't. If you use a lot of traffic when the network is idle, there should be no penalty for this, because the capacity otherwise goes to waste.
If you use traffic when the network is congested, so is everyone else who is active when the network is congested, so you should all get an equal share if you're paying the same monthly fee, and a share proportional to your max connection speed if you're not. Nothing to do with how much you used when the network was idle.
But that means that bandwidth is still utilized, while a bandwidth cap at, say, 10Mbps would mean that 10 users are make up what one user at 100Mbps make up. In theory, a neighborhood or block might have the cable infrastructure to support 10Gbps simultaneously. There is no real benefit for the ISP to ensure that bandwidth is 100% utilized, so they have no incentive give a user more bandwidth than they paid for. Thus, capped bandwidth.
I’d suspect data caps are useful for over sold areas, but are great for lining the pockets of greedy ISPs.
Unlimited Data is $30/mo in many markets for Comcast, and if you use xFi Complete for $25/mo and just flip the modem into bridge mode, you also get unlimited data included (taking their modem saves you five bucks a month, and it’s compatible with Gigabit x2 which is 2000/200 service).
At least this somewhat makes sense with satellite.
I have a 1gbps down connection and 1 TB cap because my ISP has a monopoly. I pay an arm and leg for this connection. The nearest competitor is basically a town over.
Don't worry, I can pay an extra $150/mo for unlimited data on top of my already $300 connection. I'm not convinced networks should be public utilities but certainly ISPs should be pursued for de facto monopolies. These jerks even tanked my connection during COVID because of all the Netflix consuming the bandwidth at the trunk. Customers paying for 1 gbps down (< 1% of their customer base I'd imagine) should have priority access in times of increased usage. I shouldn't have to compete with a 20 mbps home connection for usage at the astronomical cost I pay for the privilege.
$300! Wow. I pay about 80 from Comcast for the same service, actually unsure if it has a soft cap. We average about 600gb per month usage. Comcast is also our one and only choice so I am at their mercy with price changes.
10 Euros for a ~gigabit? That's crazy! In 20 years that's only 200 Euros. Even ignoring the cost of procuring the gear and maintaining it and the business for 20 years I'm not even sure how that covers the transit costs for the data during that time.
Reads as exceedingly reasonable as written. If the network is congested, someone has to pay in a slower connection. It makes sense to place that burden on the heaviest users.
Does Starlink have a live dashboard showing what their capacity is, how much of it is being used, what most people's usage is like, and what my usage is like? What plans, with timeframes, there are to increase capacity?
Because, based on industry practices since forever, I'm not in a trusting mood.
It would be cool of it was based both on available bandwidth AND usage over 1TB. E.g. when the network is over-utilized, any users over 1TB will be throttled.
It sounds like that is what they are doing. Deprioritizing, to me means that even after 1 TB, you would still have full speed assuming enough bandwidth is available.
The biggest loser here seems to business users, who, for $500/mo get 1TB of data prioritized over nearly everyone, but then are capped to 1Mbps up/down until they pay $1/GB for more priority data! Even worse for maritime users, same, but $2/GB!
Parents got a 4k tv on it, and it can spike upto 50gigs on a weekend day when they are watching tv all day. Not hitting 1TB a month, but with a full house its getting close.
Told them if they do any updates for the pc's do it after 11, and change the tv to 1080p if possible on streaming apps.
People kinda forget that before Starlink we had... Iridium. Which cost an arm and a leg for Internet speeds that my kids would call "Dad, why isn't Internet working?" It was just about enough to get in touch with the rest of the world when in some silly places far away from civilisation. When you need one you need one.
People never stop to be amazed even for a second for the amazing things we have nowadays and how cheap.
At 20 mbit/s (usual bitrate for 4k tv channels, as well as netflix, prime, apple+ etc. premium vods) that's 9GB per hour, so you'd reach a 1TB monthly cap by watching for like 4 hours a day on a single device.
This is satellite, i.e., internet for people who can't get a physical network connection better than dial-up over copper. Starlink's closest competition is Exede (by Viasat) with monthly data caps on the order of 60GB. If you use 1TB+/mo, you're probably not viewing Starlink as an upgrade from Exede and should opt for something closer to your needs.
I'd hazard a guess that people who should be using their local cable provider's solution are the reason Starlink is now imposing this data cap...
edit: Exede apparently now offers up to 30mbps and a 100GB/mo cap in my area, their second highest plan. Other points still stand...
Looking past the snark of your comment, I think the person you are responding to has a legitimate point: the cap doesn't apply to 8 hours of the day. Actually, it isn't even a cap, it's just that traffic after 1TB is de-prioritized. If you are in a cell that isn't congested, there will be no impact on you.
> For Residential Service Plans, your data usage will only count toward the Priority Access data limits described in the chart below during 7AM to 11PM (“Peak Hours”). Your usage between 11PM and 7AM will not count toward Priority Access data limits.
Seems like you knew that comment's source, and rather than question the validity of it directly you want to talk around that for whatever reason.
I have no idea what you are talking about when you say this thread already had a link to the source. I even prefaced my reply with "I trust you" so it wouldn't come off as rude or me questioning its validity.
Haha, your comment looked super snarky to me. I guess it's just because sarcasm doesn't translate well into text, so we assume it's there even if someone didn't mean to be sarcastic
> Traffic from 11pm to 7am isn't going to be part of the 1TB.
I'm still a proponent of Starlink, despite Musk's recent BS with Ukrainian coverage that has been paid for by various sources, but how is this going to be mitigated? If it's current user-base is taxing it's bandwidth will simply adding more satellites a tenable solution?
> If Starlink isn't profitable with the current set of satellites, how can lose less money by adding more?
The US DoD, and various European Military is giving them a significant amount of money from private users; if this is a prioritization thing to ensure connectivity in certain areas (like war zones) I can understand that, if it's a scale thing that will eventually be mitigated with more satellites I can sort of understand that but the costs just went down and with more satellites and launches on the manifest this year than any other.
1Tb of data is fair for most people's usecase I imagine, and any overage from this userbase can mitigated with more expensive tiered packages, I just don't see how this can be tenable in the long term if they are to cover such a large breadth of the Human population as they anticipate.
Again, I'm a big believer of the SpaceX team and what they represent, I 've seen it in person and it's the most inspiring thing I've seen to date; what I have an issue is with is with Elon burning bridges with people who have the greatest need for these services and being left to defend it later when things like this occur: they were assisting in Tonga after the volcano, there was a pressing need for it in Kazakhstan during the revolt and subsequent suppression from the Russia/FSB and then subsequently in Ukraine not long after the invasion. And this was just in 2022.
This was all the Marketing they needed to sell this as a solid solution but I fear Elon is the biggest impediment here and I hope that Twitter takes all his attention so shit like this doesn't keep impeding progress.
With faster and better interconnected birds. Improved density, larger coverage areas away from ground stations, higher margin services like RV, boats, cruise ships, planes etc.
> They currently have ~3000 satellites. The total plan has ~12,000 satellites.
I gave more context below, what I'm saying is that perhaps it was foolish to lower prices for existing customers if it was going to be capped at 1TB, and given that their are combat zones depending on this connectivity (UA) than it was better to subsidize the costs to cover costs as it scales and offer tiered packages to offset this bandwidth issue. Instead you have Elon making unfounded claims, about it being given away for free, and then threatening to pull connectivity etc... obviously he got spoken to by the DoD, who pretty much prop up SpaceX, and the aerospace Industry as a whole is mainly military so that kind of behaviour will be stamped out at asap.
This is my biggest issue, that we all thought we would have created a path decentralized internet but its just as egregious as another telecoms except this one is done capable of being derailed and undoing all the immense work of amazing techs/engineers by what is essentially PT Barnem 2.0.
Considering the speed of my “unlimited” cellular data from T-Mobile gets deprioritized after 50 GB, and Comcast limiting me to 1.2 TB per month, I would have expected a satellite Internet to put up a much lower cap than 1 TB. I wouldn’t be surprised if they keep on lowering that cap as they add more users.
With a large initial hardware but that can’t be used for anything else. I could see my European consumer protection authority ruling that they need to offer the option of hardware buyback in cases where the contract changes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33473757