24 ms·

Starlink to start “deprioritizing” traffic after 1TB monthly

115 points by noncoml 4y ago

Andys 4y ago
Traffic from 11pm to 7am isn't going to be part of the 1TB.
- Melting_Harps 4y 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?
  - 7e 4y ago
    If Starlink isn't profitable with the current set of satellites, how can lose less money by adding more?
    - mgiampapa 4y ago
      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.
      - Robotbeat 4y ago
        Also, they're upgrading the launch vehicle, which will lower the cost of launch per kg by a factor of 10 or so.
    - Melting_Harps 4y ago
      > 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.
  - phire 4y ago
    They currently have ~3000 satellites. The total plan has ~12,000 satellites. So that's going to basically quadruple the available bandwidth?
    - Robotbeat 4y ago
      They're also increasing the size (and probably bandwidth) of each satellite by a factor of 5 or so with gen2. Total constellation size would be like 40,000 satellites. Overall that means roughly 50-100 times the current bandwidth.
    - Melting_Harps 4y ago
      > 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.
- Eleison23 4y ago
  SpaceX is launching a crewed mission to the Sun. It's safe; they're traveling only at night.
  - whyenot 4y 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.
- KyleBerezin 4y ago
  I trust you, but do you have a source? Hopefully not in the form of a jpeg lol
  - Someone1234 4y 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 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.
    - KyleBerezin 4y ago
      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. edit: also, thank you for the link
      - Firmwarrior 4y ago
        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
IronWolve 4y 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 4y 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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - indigodaddy 4y ago
    100% agree. I’d reckon we tear through 1TB in about 10 days.
  - argiopetech 4y 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 4y ago
    I currently have satellite with Xplornet and pay $99/mo for a 50gb cap. For the target demographic, 1TB is more than fair.
- twawaaay 4y ago
  This is "satellite" Internet. It is absolutely bonkers amazing you can get 1TB at all.
superkuh 4y 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.
- spamtarget 4y 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 4y ago
    If you can offer me unlimited beer for a fixed consumer-range monthly price, I've got a bridge to sell you.
    - spamtarget 4y ago
      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
      - tomcam 4y ago
        +1 for a vuvuzela reference on HN
    - kjkjadksj 4y ago
      A better analogy is probably a gym membership cutting you off from working out twice a day
    - fragmede 4y ago
      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.
syrrim 4y 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 4y 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.
  - KyleBerezin 4y 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.
    - jjeaff 4y ago
      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.
virtuallynathan 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
    Is it cheaper to buy a second dish and pay for a second Starlink subscription?
    - ec109685 4y ago
      $500 cheaper. $1000 / month for two starlinks) for 2TB of data versus $1.5k for 2TB of data. Assumes you use all 2TB each month though.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Jedd 4y 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).
- indigodaddy 4y 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 4y 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.
    - jwcooper 4y ago
      Our family routinely gets close to our 1.2TB cap. 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...
valeg 4y ago
1TB cap is a lot of internet, especially for sat connectivity.
notfried 4y 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 4y 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.
- mackatap 4y 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.
  - daliusd 4y ago
    Wow 80. I pay 10 euros for about the same.
    - zamadatix 4y ago
      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.
      - ribosometronome 4y ago
        Presumably he means per month not per year? As does the people above him paying $80 and $300? So his 20 year payment would be 2400 Euros.
    - 4y ago
dathinab 4y 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 4y ago
  All Starlink customers are month-to-month.
  - waffleiron 4y 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 4y ago
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33473757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33473757
nikau 4y ago
wait you're trying to tell me a musk solution like his tunnels aren't scalable?

115 points by noncoml 4y ago

Andys 4y ago

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

Melting_Harps 4y 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?
- 7e 4y ago
  If Starlink isn't profitable with the current set of satellites, how can lose less money by adding more?
  - mgiampapa 4y ago
    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.
    - Robotbeat 4y ago
      Also, they're upgrading the launch vehicle, which will lower the cost of launch per kg by a factor of 10 or so.
  - Melting_Harps 4y ago
    > 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.
- phire 4y ago
  They currently have ~3000 satellites. The total plan has ~12,000 satellites. So that's going to basically quadruple the available bandwidth?
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    They're also increasing the size (and probably bandwidth) of each satellite by a factor of 5 or so with gen2. Total constellation size would be like 40,000 satellites. Overall that means roughly 50-100 times the current bandwidth.
  - Melting_Harps 4y ago
    > 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.
Eleison23 4y ago
SpaceX is launching a crewed mission to the Sun. It's safe; they're traveling only at night.
- whyenot 4y 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.
KyleBerezin 4y ago
I trust you, but do you have a source? Hopefully not in the form of a jpeg lol
- Someone1234 4y 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 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.
  - KyleBerezin 4y ago
    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. edit: also, thank you for the link
    - Firmwarrior 4y ago
      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

IronWolve 4y 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 4y 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- indigodaddy 4y ago
  100% agree. I’d reckon we tear through 1TB in about 10 days.
- argiopetech 4y 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 4y ago
  I currently have satellite with Xplornet and pay $99/mo for a 50gb cap. For the target demographic, 1TB is more than fair.
twawaaay 4y ago
This is "satellite" Internet. It is absolutely bonkers amazing you can get 1TB at all.

superkuh 4y 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.

spamtarget 4y 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 4y ago
  If you can offer me unlimited beer for a fixed consumer-range monthly price, I've got a bridge to sell you.
  - spamtarget 4y ago
    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
    - tomcam 4y ago
      +1 for a vuvuzela reference on HN
  - kjkjadksj 4y ago
    A better analogy is probably a gym membership cutting you off from working out twice a day
  - fragmede 4y ago
    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.

syrrim 4y 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 4y 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.
- KyleBerezin 4y 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.
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    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.

virtuallynathan 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
  Is it cheaper to buy a second dish and pay for a second Starlink subscription?
  - ec109685 4y ago
    $500 cheaper. $1000 / month for two starlinks) for 2TB of data versus $1.5k for 2TB of data. Assumes you use all 2TB each month though.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Jedd 4y 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).

indigodaddy 4y 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 4y 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.
  - jwcooper 4y ago
    Our family routinely gets close to our 1.2TB cap. 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...

valeg 4y ago

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

notfried 4y 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 4y 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.

mackatap 4y 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.
- daliusd 4y ago
  Wow 80. I pay 10 euros for about the same.
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    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.
    - ribosometronome 4y ago
      Presumably he means per month not per year? As does the people above him paying $80 and $300? So his 20 year payment would be 2400 Euros.
  - 4y ago

dathinab 4y 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 4y ago
All Starlink customers are month-to-month.
- waffleiron 4y 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 4y ago

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

nikau 4y ago

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