Starlink to start “deprioritizing” traffic after 1TB monthly
i.imgur.com
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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).
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.
1TB isn't what it used to be...
Most of the time, you aren't even playing the games actively, so you won't even notice the ~6h delay after patch release.
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).
Maybe on Fiber but if I was using a satellite service idk, I might understand the difference.
Having lived in a rural home with WiMAX the idea of having 1TB caps with high speed sounds like something you don't get to complain about.
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.
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.
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.
1TB is pretty modest for a household.
> The average property connected to the Openreach network used around 3,000GB of data in 2020, or around 9GB per day
More recently, that's doubled to 0.5 TB/month[1].
Still, the point I should have made is: is using twice or thrice the (presumably) median unreasonable? Not necessarily.
Of course, deprioritisation after a certain amount isn't unreasonable either, provided there is succificent truth in advertising.
[1] https://advanced-television.com/2022/10/13/study-uk-homes-us...
"How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed 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.
*edited from cap
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.
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.
From Netflix:
High definition (HD) 720p: 3 Mbps
Full high definition (FHD) 1080p: 5 Mbps
4K/Ultra HD (UHD) 4K: 15 Mbps
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.
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.
It's very easy to hit that cap with a moderately-sized family doing normal things all month, no piracy needed.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
how is using a service according to what was promised “abuse”?
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.
I think you should be grumpy with you service provider who seems to have no idea how to properly manage traffic ;)
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.
I cut my bandwidth usage when working from home by using the toggle on receiving video when I wasn’t interacting that almost all apps provide.
(it’s also nice to mute your own video when not talking to save the resources of others and also save yourself from “camera fatigue”)
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.
...Full self-driving...
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'.
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.
...while those who know they'll hammer it more than average have a specific idea of how much they can get away with.
For instance, if you maxed out a 100mpbs home connection 24/7 for a month, you could transfer no more than ~32tb.
I’d suspect data caps are useful for over sold areas, but are great for lining the pockets of greedy ISPs.
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.
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
1200 megabits / 8 = 150 megabytes
1.2 TB = 1200000 MB
12000000 MB * (1 sec / 150MB) = 8000 sec = 2.22 hours
And this is why wireless is not, and will never be, an acceptable primary connection.
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.
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.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/mobile-and-...
Last time I lived in Seoul it was cheap there as well, but that was about 15 years ago.
That was back when I was playing a lot of PUBG on Stadia - it could really rip though the data.
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.
Assumes you use all 2TB each month though.
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.
2.5TB or 5TB being the threshold would be received much better.
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...
For the target demographic, 1TB is more than fair.
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.
People never stop to be amazed even for a second for the amazing things we have nowadays and how cheap.
Frankly, the fact that you can stream 4k video for four hours a day, every day, on a satellite connection is pretty nuts.
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?
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.
So that's going to basically quadruple the available bandwidth?
Total constellation size would be like 40,000 satellites. Overall that means roughly 50-100 times the current bandwidth.
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.
It's safe; they're traveling only at night.
> 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.
edit: also, thank you for the link
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.