Starlink Nixes Plan To Impose 1TB Data Cap and Per-Gigabyte Overage Fees (arstechnica.com) 45
In a policy reversal, Starlink no longer plans to charge data overage fees to standard residential users who exceed 1TB of monthly usage. Ars Technica reports: When SpaceX's Starlink division first announced the data cap in November 2022, it said that residential customers would get 1TB of "priority access data" each month. After using 1TB, customers could keep accessing the Internet at slower (but unspecified) speeds or pay $0.25 per gigabyte for "additional priority access." This was originally supposed to take effect in December, but Starlink delayed the change to February and then to April.
But now, Starlink's list of support FAQs no longer mentions the residential data cap and the current version of the fair use policy says that standard service plan users have unlimited data. The previous version of the Starlink fair use policy described the 1TB residential cap and optional $0.25-per-gigabyte overage fees. Starlink sent an email to users that said, "Good news! Your Starlink subscription will remain unlimited and will no longer be deprioritized after 1TB of data use." Nathan Owens, a Netflix engineer who frequently tweets about Starlink, posted a screenshot of the email yesterday.
But now, Starlink's list of support FAQs no longer mentions the residential data cap and the current version of the fair use policy says that standard service plan users have unlimited data. The previous version of the Starlink fair use policy described the 1TB residential cap and optional $0.25-per-gigabyte overage fees. Starlink sent an email to users that said, "Good news! Your Starlink subscription will remain unlimited and will no longer be deprioritized after 1TB of data use." Nathan Owens, a Netflix engineer who frequently tweets about Starlink, posted a screenshot of the email yesterday.
Prefer overage fees to speed pricing (Score:2)
I would rather have an ISP that charged for data usage, rather than have to pay extra for a high speed connection that I only take advantage of a few days a year.
On the Internet, that is not a good idea (Score:3)
Since ISPs typically include downstream traffic in their usage bills, that can quickly spiral out of control. On the Internet you have no way to control how much data the Internet will send you. People can just send you gigabytes of traffic without you even noticing.
It's like paying for incoming mail. You'll never know how much mail you will get.
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It's like paying for incoming mail. You'll never know how much mail you will get.
I mean, you do have some idea.... Outside a DDOS, is this actually an issue?
Re: On the Internet, that is not a good idea (Score:3)
Some days the amount of traffic from "unsolicited junk" can exceed 20 gigabytes. Not counting DDOS days. Depends of course heavily on how much the ISP filters.
I think starlink runs cgnat though, which cuts down on the junk dramatically.
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Some days the amount of traffic from "unsolicited junk" can exceed 20 gigabytes.
20gig of what though? Btw, apps updating themselves dont count, running a webserver doesnt count.
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I think the problem is just as bad with web sites and web pages. Back in the last century bandwidth was scarce, so web pages were svelte and to the point. Now they are bloated caricatures of their former efficiency, and one has no idea how much data will be downloaded to ensure you have the "experience" the authors intended.
Massive multimegabit libraries from several frameworks? Check! Multiple high res videos auto playing in the margins? Check! Layers and layers of CSS for 'presentation' and 'navigatio
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This is a problem that all shared spectrum ISPs face, including terrestrial wireless ones. Cable broadband operators can upgrade their hardware to get more bandwidth out of existing fibre optic cables, but it's much more difficult with wireless systems where customer equipment (that in Starlink's case they paid for) would need to be upgraded as well.
Meanwhile the market in many countries is moving to unlimited products, with data caps being slowly removed.
Satellite broadband providers mostly deliberately li
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You do this for yourself already. Or at least you should be. You prioritize time sensitive data ahead of bulk data. Your video call will suffer if that data is dropped, but your 2 hour download taking an extra second or two isn't all that big of a deal.
And there are various things in between those extremes, like normal video streaming, where if it is delayed too much, you'll have problems, but it can tolerate some latency, and short typing packets from interactive SSH traffic that can potentially be bundled with other short packets into a larger frame, but only within a fairly narrow time window.
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Triggered libtards not choosing services based on what's the best solution for them, but rather on whether the CEO tweets rainbows or not. And we wonder why America is uncompetitive.
America is uncompetitive because of unsustainably growing wealth inequality. Where you spend your money is the most important vote you have under capitalism, and choosing not to support corporations which actively spend money to oppose your view of what progress looks like is a rational decision. We create the future together.
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Oooh marked flamebait. Here I was thinking I was going to be accused to be a pedo like everyone else who criticises the Muskchild.
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He's turned twitter into the meth lab of the internet
It's been that for years; let's not pretend that Twitter was some oasis of internet nirvana on October 26, 2022 and suddenly became the internet trash heap a day later.
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He's turned twitter into the meth lab of the internet
It's been that for years; let's not pretend that Twitter was some oasis of internet nirvana on October 26, 2022 and suddenly became the internet trash heap a day later.
Up until that point, they were at least policing the (metaphorical) meth labs and shutting them down sometimes. What happened in the Musk era was that they stopped doing that, and the (metaphorical) meth labs became the dominant industry because all the other businesses didn't want to be seen and/or didn't feel safe operating next door to the (metaphorical) meth labs.
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...the same thing happens????
this is STANDARD with any decent ISP....
https://www.speedtest.net/glob... [speedtest.net]
oh wow...
my Country - Australia (16) - outranks America (19) in mobile ISP speeds...
my country - Australia does exactly this.... throttles after you've reached your limit unless you pay extra (or are on an unlimited plan like I am)....
but yes...bitch and complain you can't download the internet 50 times a month and not incur extra fees - just because....'merica
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Imagine...Elon Musk, strapped into one his teslas and on a EOL trajectory to the moon, or mars....now that's some pay per view worth paying for.
Re:1TB data cap? (Score:5, Informative)
It looks like you did the math for a Gigabyte instead of a Terabyte there. So you're off by a few orders of magnitude.
1TB @ 500KBps = 2,097,152 seconds, or 582.5 hours, or 24.2 days of video.
Re: 1TB data cap? (Score:2)
Ah, thanks. This what I get for trying to do math at 5am, lolâ¦
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Lol, yeah, I was about to comment "how the hell does this guy think 30 mins of YT videos adds up to 1TB?"
Like, just intuitively, your brain should have gone "hey... wait a minute... that can't be right!"
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For reference, 4k HDR video is about 10-15x that data rate.
Day one game patches are often in the 100GB range.
I find cloud backups often eat quite a lot of bandwidth, but you need a much better upload speed (or a very long time) for that to be viable.
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Data caps are not ridiculous nonsense. They can be very valuable. If your network is constrained, and it would not be profitable to scale it (as is often in rural areas) then people have to play nice. Declaring it ridiculous is failing to acknowledge that actual economies exist. Sure they can be abused, but sometimes they are simply needed.
When a whole town or county shares a small pipe, Joe Downloader who decides that all of TV has to be torrented needs to be stopped.
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When a whole town or county shares a small pipe, Joe Downloader who decides that all of TV has to be torrented needs to be stopped.
When a whole town or county shares a small pipe, that's the problem. Worrying about the excessive use of a few outliers is always the wrong answer, because the outliers tend to be the people who are at the forefront of technology, and represent what everyone will be doing in five or ten years.
If you're bandwidth-limited already, that's a problem you need to solve. Punishing the outliers just kicks the can down the road slightly.
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It's nice that you think this is how things "should" be. But things are not like that everywhere. "Last mile" projects fail all the time.
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For reference, 4k HDR video is about 10-15x that data rate.
Not so. Netflix, YouTube, etc. all say that their 4K is around 20 Mbps (i.e. 4-5x the above data rate), which makes sense, given that 4K has 4x the pixels of 1080p, which they’re able to stream at 4-5 Mbps.
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All the streaming services send a relatively low fidelity stream. But you're right, we have to go with what's actually being used. Physical media was closer to 30Mbps for 1080p using H.264. Even with HEVC, it would be well over 10Mbps to keep that quality level.
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YouTube claims up to 51Mbps for 4k60: https://support.google.com/you... [google.com]
That's for an 8 bit SDR stream. Once you go to 10 bit HDR and/or 120fps the bitrate rises.
The actual bitrate depends on the content as YouTube seems to be using a constant quality algorithm.
YouTube also supports 8k HDR 120fps, but I have not tried it yet.
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YouTube claims up to 51Mbps for 4k60
Actually, YouTube claims "up to" 85 Mbps for 4k60 [google.com], but both 51 Mbps and 85 Mbps are irrelevant to the topic at hand because they're aimed at content creators, not viewers.
When we're talking about viewing, Google recommends 15 Mbps [google.com] to 20 Mbps for viewing 4K UHD content [google.com] (just as I said), which falls exactly in line with the "4-5x" number I suggested. Content creators have a higher recommended bitrate because Google wants as much data to work with as possible when they do their own re-encoding of the file, but
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Yes.
But to be fair, my 4G connection has a 1Tb limit (and then "traffic managed") and I managed to burst through that about 2 months out of every 12 just with normal usage.
It was running my entire house, but it's just me in it.
And mostly it wasn't video at all, but downloads - software, updates, etc.
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Letâ(TM)s assume that you are watching video at an average bitrate of 4Mbps. That corresponds to about 500KBps which is equivalent to 2000 seconds of non stop video. That is a half hour of watching youtube videos.
I’d love to hear your explanation for how they manage to cram an entire 4K movie onto a blu-ray that has far less than 1 TB of storage.
Hint: you’re off by three orders of magnitude with your math.
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Starlink Rural Canada offer (Score:4, Interesting)
Just received an offer from Starlink of CAD 199 (versus $749 normal) for the equipment purchase and $140 per month. Your location has to be approved but it is labelled "rural Canada" which covers a lot of territory. The map shows pretty much everything between latitude 49 N and about 70 N. Tough luck Resolute Bay and Alert.
5G wireless rural internet from TELUS is now unlimited data (no cap, no slowdown) for $95 per month on a two year plan and the equipment is free. Well actually you pay for it over two years but the payment is rebated every month: net zero.
Thank you EM for giving the terrestrial providers some competition.
Mind you, the current $95/month is a "special". Starlink, TELUS, Bell, et al are ready to jack the prices back up as soon as the competitive atmosphere dissipates.
Speeds from the 5G network can be up to 75Mbs but where I am it is typically 30Mbps symmetrical up & down. Also, the 5G is not stand alone (relies on the LTE network for control) and can be unstable at longer distances (I am 12 km from the tower). Apparently, when they upgrade to stand alone 5G, those problems go away.
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Speeds from the 5G network can be up to 75Mbs but where I am it is typically 30Mbps symmetrical up & down. Also, the 5G is not stand alone (relies on the LTE network for control) and can be unstable at longer distances (I am 12 km from the tower). Apparently, when they upgrade to stand alone 5G, those problems go away.
Actually speeds from 5G network should go much, much higher than 75Mbps. I guess in your case the main limiting factor is the distance to the tower, since the faster bands use higher frequencies - which consequently have shorter ranges.
But just for comparison, a local operator (Telia) offers here in Finland a nice 5G asymmetrical 1Gbps down 100MBps up connection for 45 euros per month. No data caps, no slowdown.
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Actually speeds from 5G network should go much, much higher than 75Mbps. I guess in your case the main limiting factor is the distance to the tower, since the faster bands use higher frequencies - which consequently have shorter ranges.
But just for comparison, a local operator (Telia) offers here in Finland a nice 5G asymmetrical 1Gbps down 100MBps up connection for 45 euros per month. No data caps, no slowdown.
We get much better data rates in urban areas where there are higher frequency bands available and distances are under 1000 m. My locale is RF transmission challenged with 60' trees all around. I get my signal through a gap where my driveway comes up; at night I can see the tower hazard light on the horizon.
Gigabit service, unlimited data, CAD 70 per month? I wish!
The only reason TELUS is offering the plan I described is to compete with Starlink.
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My locale is RF transmission challenged with 60' trees all around. I get my signal through a gap where my driveway comes up; at night I can see the tower hazard light on the horizon.
Do you use a directional antenna to connect to the tower - those improve the signal a lot, especially as you have a clear line-of-sight? And use Cellmapper.net service to make sure there aren't any other cell towers nearby (maybe with the beams better directed at your house).
Before I got the fiber installed last year, my internet connection (for the whole house) was coming through a 4G router with fixed, directional antenna installed on the exterior wall. That one gave over 200Mbps down as well and serve
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Do you use a directional antenna to connect to the tower - those improve the signal a lot, especially as you have a clear line-of-sight?
And use Cellmapper.net service to make sure there aren't any other cell towers nearby (maybe with the beams better directed at your house).
I have a 10' (3m) parabolic reflector behind the transponder. I get a measured gain of 21 to 28 db depending on the band.
I know where every tower is for 100km around me. Cellmapper is ok, not always complete or accurate. Industry Canada maintains a public database of tower information.
Downgrade (Score:2)
I would've preferred to keep the 1TB "data cap" (it wasn't really a "data cap" and I wasn't hitting it anyway) to what has now happened to my and many others' account where we've seen a performance hit of 3/4th. I used to regularly get close to 200 Mbit/s download. Now I'm luck to get to 50. 30-50 is now the norm.
Especially considering they recently raised the cost of what we pay. Pay more, get 75% less. Such a deal.
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