Starlink has made a big mistake…
Starlink now has data caps.
Yes, you read that right. The glorious internet service that was promised to provide amazing connectivity to people in rural areas with no data caps has now thrown that idea out the window. Now all customers have a 1 TB data limit.
Most people will realize that one terabyte of data is not enough for the average user. People use a lot of data every day. For example, someone who is on social media sites can easily rack up a few gigabytes each day with little to no effort. Not to mention when Starlink first was advertised it was advertised towards gamers and people that don’t have any other options for good Internet in rural areas. Not to mention the fact that they made a big deal of not having any sort of data caps alongside their super-fast Internet.
Well, the day has come, and they’re saying a big fuck you to all of their users, including their early adopters, like myself that paid thousands of dollars for their equipment on top of their ever-increasing monthly fee as well.
Now, to be clear, this is what we’re looking at when it comes to the fees associated with your account and going over their new data cap limit.
Your $110 monthly fee (Excluding the cost of your equipment)
$0.25 per GB of prioritized data after you’ve used up your 1TB.
Something else that people don’t realize is once you reach your 1 TB limit your speeds are downgraded to 1 MB per second both up and down. Which is barely enough to check your email let alone to try and play some games or watch a video.
Now if you browse through places like Twitter or other social media that are talking about the situation there are a decent amount of people that don’t think this is a big deal. They have no grasp of reality when it comes to how much data we’re talking about here. One terabyte of data is nothing in this day and age.
If you’re someone who regularly watches videos on YouTube, Netflix, twitch, etc. then you’re gonna know very quickly when you go over your limit.
Here’s another situation for the gamers out there. What about when the new call of duty updates? That’s 50 GB down the drain right there. Sometimes 100 GB is down the drain. Now do that a couple of times throughout the month and you’re chewing a big chunk out of your monthly allotment.
Let’s think of Content creators such as myself. One terabyte of data is simply not enough on a month-to-month basis. We are constantly downloading games, as well as other media, to produce the videos that we then have to upload. Keep in mind a live stream is the same as a regular video and takes up a lot of bandwidth. In some cases, a live stream can result in you uploading tens of gigs of data per stream. For example, my most recent live stream was about 80 GB in size for an hour of footage.
So it’s not hard to see that with just some simple math we could easily blow through this small allocated amount of data per month. To add to the insult is the fact that the non-prioritized traffic that you would get is 1 MB down and 1 MB up in speed. That’s not enough to do anything useful. That’s essentially dial-up at this point in this day and age.
Starlink fucked up when introducing this new rule. I for one will no longer be recommending their service to anybody for this reason. It’s 2022 and no tech company that provides Internet service, for example, should have any sort of data caps.
Starlink | Starlink Data Caps | Starlink Data Limits
