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Starlink Is Getting Daytime Data Caps ... Oh, Never Mind

8 Nov 2022 9:28 AM | Anonymous

This article is not about any of the "normal" topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, it kis a follow-up to a previous article I published: "Is Satellite Internet the Answer to a Presently Unreliable Internet Connection?" that I published on 3 November 2022 at: https://eogn.com/page-18080/12976963.

While I was thinking of switching my internet service provider to Starlink (the satellite provider invented by Elon Musk), I have now changed my mind after reading the following:

Starlink"Residential customers will now start each monthly billing cycle with an allocation of "Priority Access" data that tracks what you're using from 7AM in the morning until 11PM at night. If you surpass that 1TB cap, which Starlink says less than 10 percent of users currently do, you'll be moved to "Basic Access" data, or deprioritized data during heavy network congestion, for the rest of your billing cycle. If you want to buy more Priority Access data, you can, at the cost of 25 cents per GB, and any data used between 11PM and 7AM doesn't count towards your Priority Access tally.

"This announcement comes off the back of a recent article by ArsTechnica, showing that Starlink's median download speed has dropped to 62Mbps in Q2 of 2022 as the network struggles under the load of increased subscriber numbers."

If the service presently only provides 62 megabits of speed today and now the company is introducing data caps to slow it even further from 7AM until 11PM, I am no longer interested.

Comments

  • 9 Nov 2022 1:32 PM | Anonymous
    I have not found the speeds to be reduced for a regular user. Can't imagine using 1 TB of data in only one month either.
    Link  •  Reply
    • 11 Nov 2022 9:38 AM | Anonymous
      Yeah, 1 TB is if you're doing something like downloading (not streaming) 4K resolution films, or you have a half dozen people in your household streaming high definition video on separate devices for multiple hours per day.

      Comcast has a similar cap and I don't believe I've ever hit it, even with me on video calls calls and my kids on maybe two streams running for a few hours per day.
      Link  •  Reply

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