Starlink to start “deprioritizing” traffic after 1TB monthly

https://i.imgur.com/NfSTpZN.jpg

by noncoml • 4 years ago

115 141 4 years ago

i.imgur.com

Andys• 4 years ago

Traffic from 11pm to 7am isn't going to be part of the 1TB.

Melting_Harps3• 4 years ago

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?

7e3• 4 years ago

If Starlink isn't profitable with the current set of satellites, how can lose less money by adding more?

phire• 4 years ago

They currently have ~3000 satellites. The total plan has ~12,000 satellites.

So that's going to basically quadruple the available bandwidth?

Eleison23• 4 years ago

SpaceX is launching a crewed mission to the Sun.

It's safe; they're traveling only at night.

whyenot• 4 years ago

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.

KyleBerezin3• 4 years ago

I trust you, but do you have a source? Hopefully not in the form of a jpeg lol

Someone1234• 4 years ago

This thread links to a provided source which itself points to another source on Starlink's website in their Fair Use Policy here:

https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1134-82708-70
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.

IronWolve• 4 years ago

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.

dannyw• 4 years ago

Fair use policies are fine when it's fair, but 1TB for a household's home internet is not fair in 2022.

2.5TB or 5TB being the threshold would be received much better.

indigodaddy2• 4 years ago

100% agree. I’d reckon we tear through 1TB in about 10 days.

argiopetech• 4 years ago

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...

KMnO4• 4 years ago

I currently have satellite with Xplornet and pay $99/mo for a 50gb cap.

For the target demographic, 1TB is more than fair.

twawaaay2• 4 years ago

This is "satellite" Internet. It is absolutely bonkers amazing you can get 1TB at all.

hombre_fatal2• 4 years ago

Yeah, that seems to be lost on people here.

Starlink has given me amazing internet on a tiny beach in Mexico. Before it, my internet was so bad I couldn’t do Zoom calls.

dopa42365• 4 years ago

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.

fijiaarone• 4 years ago

So, if you need to watch more than 4 hours of TV a day, get cable, or pay more than $110/month.

superkuh2• 4 years ago

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.

7e3• 4 years ago

Comcast doesn't have infinite bandwidth, does it? At some point it all drops down to a small straw.

10000truths• 4 years ago

That’s an argument for bandwidth caps, not data caps.

shepherdjerred• 4 years ago

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

Nullabillity• 4 years ago

Comcast can easily add more straws where needed. Wireless hucksters like Starlink can't.

And this is why wireless is not, and will never be, an acceptable primary connection.

spamtarget2• 4 years ago

no, it does not make sense. it's like if you buy too much beer in a month, they start to mix it with water and sell it for the same price

matrix_overload• 4 years ago

If you can offer me unlimited beer for a fixed consumer-range monthly price, I've got a bridge to sell you.

S_A_P• 4 years ago

I pay 50 a month extra to Concast for no caps or throttling, and for the most part it seems to be true.

nixgeek• 4 years ago

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).

Lucent• 4 years ago

Odd how Comcast needs a data cap for "outliers," yet every apartment complex can offer free unlimited, unmetered water usage.

xwolfi• 4 years ago

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.

bushbaba• 4 years ago

Comcast doesn’t give you dedicated bandwidth. Their spectrum is a limited commodity just like starlink. Lots of similarities actually.

superkuh2• 4 years ago

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.

syrrim• 4 years ago

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.

JellyBeanThief• 4 years ago

It does.

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.

KyleBerezin3• 4 years ago

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.

virtuallynathan• 4 years ago

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!

donmcronald• 4 years ago

1Mbps is brutally slow. I wonder why they picked that. There's got to be something between 1Mbps and 100Mbps that wouldn't have to cost $1k a TB.

borissk• 4 years ago

Is it cheaper to buy a second dish and pay for a second Starlink subscription?

Jedd9• 4 years ago

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).

indigodaddy2• 4 years ago

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.

umvi• 4 years ago

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.

Teever• 4 years ago

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".

https://youtu.be/PdFB7q89_3U?t=97

cute_boi• 4 years ago

"abusing the service"

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.

JCharante• 4 years ago

Most people aren’t watching 4k unless they have the tv on all day. Most people watch on lower res devices

chrsig• 4 years ago

For some perspective, in ~2006 I had satellite internet. We had a rolling 30 day window for 8gb of bandwidth.

raverbashing• 4 years ago

Are you watching 4K videos everywhere? On you phone? Every hour of every day?

Most people won't even notice if it's 1024p instead of 4k. Really

"1TB per month" sounds awfully entitled. And yeah, deprioritizing sounds like a fair solution.

jbverschoor6• 4 years ago

You don’t get 1TB on your cellphone when roaming.

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

danw19793• 4 years ago

Continually watching 4k video all day is definitely not normal internet usage and I agree with Starlink that it should be policed.

yrgulation• 4 years ago

“people currently abusing the service”

how is using a service according to what was promised “abuse”?

xfitm3• 4 years ago

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.

Jedd9• 4 years ago

Are you using Starlink for these all-day every-day video conferences?

Symbiote4• 4 years ago

4Mb/s * 3600s * 8 hours work per day * 20 days / 8 bits = 288GB.

accountofme• 4 years ago

If it is sold as unlimited, then using the service at the maximum bandwidth all month is not abuse - that is normal use.

I think you should be grumpy with you service provider who seems to have no idea how to properly manage traffic ;)

fragmede2• 4 years ago

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.

Symbiote4• 4 years ago

The most Zoom claims to use is 4Mb/s.

morphle• 4 years ago

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.

iforgotpassword• 4 years ago

5GB/hr sounds more than enough for video conferencing!? Does your job require you to do that in 4k?

shalmanese• 4 years ago

You are doing 1 1/4 full time jobs' worth of video conferencing per week, every week?

Eddy_Viscosity22• 4 years ago

it was sold as an 'all you can eat' service

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.

diydsp• 4 years ago

bait and switch.

...Full self-driving...

Jedd9• 4 years ago

This is the bigger issue here.

It really is not.

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'.

valeg• 4 years ago

1TB cap is a lot of internet, especially for sat connectivity.

notfried• 4 years ago

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.

Test0129• 4 years ago

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.

mackatap2• 4 years ago

$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.

daliusd2• 4 years ago

Wow 80. I pay 10 euros for about the same.

Reason077• 4 years ago

During Covid I used over 1TB a month on my 5G connection some months.

That was back when I was playing a lot of PUBG on Stadia - it could really rip though the data.

dathinab• 4 years ago

If it's a contract term it isn't that unreasonable.

If it's a unilateral change it likely isn't legal in many countries.

Not that musk seems to generally care much about the law.

yokem55• 4 years ago

All Starlink customers are month-to-month.

waffleiron• 4 years ago

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.

merricksb• 4 years ago

Earlier discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33473757

nikau• 4 years ago

wait you're trying to tell me a musk solution like his tunnels aren't scalable?

Starlink to start “deprioritizing” traffic after 1TB monthly

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