Starlink introduces 'data cap' of 1TB per month

[ComradeIT]

2 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

You are aware that they are bleeding money with the war?  They are giving away a lot of the service there and a lot of the terminals

My point is that he did the Elon Musk thing where he does some performative half-measure and then decides he's not in it for the long run. If he didn't want to play the game, he shouldn't have played it from the beginning. Now the US military is investing in research for alternative technologies, because they don't trust Starlink being controlled by an egomaniac. They don't trust him. Crypto bros don't trust him. Advertisers on Twitter don't trust him. The question isn't "How much does it cost to have principles?" It's "How much does it cost to have none?"

[ZetZet]

9 hours ago, Gamer Schnitzel said:

I am curious what you do with 2 TB a month as I don't even go over 1 which I know since my ISP sends me an email monthly to tell me how much GB I used.

By any chance do you also  have 5x4TB HDDs in your PC?

I watch everything in 4K, download and seed torrents. 

[wanderingfool2]

1 hour ago, ComradeIT said:

My point is that he did the Elon Musk thing where he does some performative half-measure and then decides he's not in it for the long run

If you are going to try making a point don't blindly make up facts that are wrong, and use those facts as though they are solid truth proving your point.

 

e.g.

1 hour ago, ComradeIT said:

Now the US military is investing in research for alternative technologies, because they don't trust Starlink being controlled by an egomaniac

The US military has always looked for multiple vendors for technologies, which is why they want to look into other alternatives as well.

 

Here's a hint though, the militaries were forced into Starlink pretty much because the other sat providers in Ukraine fell offline on day one of the war and never recovered (the hardware was bricked in the region).  You are just blindly assuming you know reasons that clearly you don't if you think they were war profiteering.

 

1 hour ago, ComradeIT said:

Advertisers on Twitter don't trust him

Advertisers were bailing before him, what we are seeing is the continued bailing of advertisers (because before him they were advertising next to porn and in some cases posts even worse stuff and didn't do much about it).  So yea, advertisers bailing I'm not sure really was spured on by the takeover but more or less a continuation of it (and the massive drop in revenue refers to the last few quarters likely as Twitter was losing tons of money each quarter)

 

1 hour ago, Roswell said:

 

It’s not quantifiable, it’s not a limited resource. Data transferred isn’t lost from a magic limited pile of GBs. Examples of actual limited resources are things like oil and precious metals.

 

If bandwidth was so saturated, they wouldn’t be letting people pay to go over the cap. 
 

Caps exist to skim more money from the consumer, justified by tricking said consumers into thinking that the internet is a limited resource. In reality, the providers simply don’t want to invest in the required infrastructure to serve their customer base.

 

Comcast uses the same strategy with their cap, yet… magically in the Northeast where competition exists, they somehow find themselves able to operate without a cap. 

Actually it is quite quantifiable in the sense that you launch a certain amount of sats.  You expect a certain % of usage by users and can average it out amongst many users to get the average experience.  Where trouble comes in though is when you have a few users who really go above and beyond which causes resources to be limited.

 

Notice how they mention that you will only be throttled if you are in a congested area?  That is why they let people go over the caps, because there is no point in completely kicking them off when you can just throttle them during congested times.

 

Caps exist to prevent a few select customers from abusing the system enough to negatively affect everyone else (i.e. not having the others subsidize the extra hardware needed for more bandwidth)

[Roswell]

1 minute ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Actually it is quite quantifiable in the sense that you launch a certain amount of sats.  You expect a certain % of usage by users and can average it out amongst many users to get the average experience.  Where trouble comes in though is when you have a few users who really go above and beyond which causes resources to be limited.

 

Notice how they mention that you will only be throttled if you are in a congested area?  That is why they let people go over the caps, because there is no point in completely kicking them off when you can just throttle them during congested times.

 

Caps exist to prevent a few select customers from abusing the system enough to negatively affect everyone else (i.e. not having the others subsidize the extra hardware needed for more bandwidth)

I think your point would make sense if it weren’t for the “lol none of this congestion really matters if you just pay us more money” part. 
 

You’d also need to convince me why my ISP (Comcast) is able to operate normally without a cap in my area that has competition but somehow can’t seem to do so and implements caps in areas without competition. Not to mention my Comcast bill is a fraction of what they pay for outside of my market…

 

It’s about money, not scarcity. 

[wanderingfool2]

4 minutes ago, Roswell said:

It’s about money, not scarcity. 

There are already plenty of people who are on congested areas (and there are areas that Starlink is no longer selling to because they have pretty much hit the capacity of how many they could serve in a given area).

 

$0.25 / GB for an unfettered connection is actually quite a bit.  It allows people who do require the extra amount to have an option to keep their service at a cost which would offset cost opportunity to have more people.  As someone who downloads lets say an extra 1 TB [and does so needing it], they would now be paying an extra $250 for that extra connection.

 

It call comes back to what I said in a prior post as well.  You have a given amount of bandwidth, and when it's shared amongst many users you have to sometimes disincentivize the super heavy users to not punish the average users.  By allowing the 25 cents they still make the trade off though of being able to sell to less customers if the other customers are willing to fork over the money to essentially have a more dedicated line.

[Roswell]

9 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

There are already plenty of people who are on congested areas (and there are areas that Starlink is no longer selling to because they have pretty much hit the capacity of how many they could serve in a given area).

 

$0.25 / GB for an unfettered connection is actually quite a bit.  It allows people who do require the extra amount to have an option to keep their service at a cost which would offset cost opportunity to have more people.  As someone who downloads lets say an extra 1 TB [and does so needing it], they would now be paying an extra $250 for that extra connection.

 

It call comes back to what I said in a prior post as well.  You have a given amount of bandwidth, and when it's shared amongst many users you have to sometimes disincentivize the super heavy users to not punish the average users.  By allowing the 25 cents they still make the trade off though of being able to sell to less customers if the other customers are willing to fork over the money to essentially have a more dedicated line.

I’m NOT saying that their network can’t be strained. I’m questioning the metrics behind this apparent issue when paying more on your bill magically makes the problem disappear.
 

Beyond that, IF there actually is a some serious unfixable congestion, they’re still doing this to skim extra money while they fail to meet demand and fortify their infrastructure. If they’re genuinely having issues, that’s a failure of the business plan. 

 

The consumer shouldn’t be exploited because Elon decided to oversubscribe the network. Doubly so when said consumers invested hundreds and hundreds for hardware under the assumption that they had unlimited access.

 

Comcast magically found the money in my area to improve their infrastructure and forgo caps because there’s competition. Though, when there isn’t competition in other areas, suddenly they can’t figure it out and instead implement caps. Funny how that works, right?

 

Starlink has no real competition in a lot of areas. They’re free to fuck around with their customer base as much as they want because they know those customers have nowhere else to go.

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

While I'm not a big fan of Musk, to put it mildly, this one actually makes sense. I wouldn't be surprised if companies were using Starlink to stream data from measurement stations continuously, 380 kB/s for a month still makes for 1 TB. This could incentivise them to locally store it and uplink it during the lower usage hours, significantly changing the usage pattern and allowing them to have more paying users (= more profit) simultaneously.

[suicidalfranco]

hopefully it's only on the US/Canada, cause the house i'm currently thinking of buying might have Starlink as the only viable option. Unless i want to go back to 7.2 Mbps ADSL

[Donut417]

On 11/5/2022 at 8:25 AM, ZetZet said:

I can't imagine living with a 1TB limit, but I guess for "mobile" internet it's pretty good. Personally I go over 2TB every month. 

Many cable companies in the US have data caps. They can range from 1 TB on up. Comcast for example provides 1.2TB per month, though you can pay extra $25 to $30 a month for unlimited. My family uses 700 Gigs to over 1 TB a month, it depends on what streaming services we have and what shows are out at the time.

[Roswell]

41 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

though you can pay extra $25 to $30

That’s unfortunate… $30 is what Comcast charges here for 400Mbit uncapped.

 

All of these municipal anti competition deals need to go.

[Donut417]

1 minute ago, Roswell said:

That’s unfortunate… $30 is what Comcast charges here for 400Mbit uncapped.

We pay them $89 for that speed around here. And of course we are capped. However we do stay under it and while we have come close we have not crossed the cap yet. If we end up having to pay for unlimited, Comcast will hate me, because I plan to set up a BitTorrent client just to share Linux distros. Because If Im paying for unlimited, Im using unlimited. 

[Kisai]

7 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

 

Advertisers were bailing before him, what we are seeing is the continued bailing of advertisers (because before him they were advertising next to porn and in some cases posts even worse stuff and didn't do much about it).  So yea, advertisers bailing I'm not sure really was spured on by the takeover but more or less a continuation of it (and the massive drop in revenue refers to the last few quarters likely as Twitter was losing tons of money each quarter)

 

Nope, that's wrong. Advertisers were bailing the minute Elon said he was going to buy Twitter.

 

And a lot of that was activists telling advertisers to pull their ads, but more so, it was Twitter doing -nothing- to sell ads for the last 6 months.

 

Advertisers run in cycles, and if you miss the cycle, you that can break your ad-supported website.

 

Anyway the more we see Musk work, the more we realize he only does things to destroy the competitors in the space, and once they're gone, it's back to acting like an idiotic monopolist. SpaceX? Destroy NASA. Hyperloop? Destroy California HSR. I'm sure we'll find more. At one point in time it looked like he actually gave a care, but he's pretty much gone full blown sociopath. Fortunately nobody was stupid enough to invest in crypto right? 

 

Starlink was likely aimed at destroying the competition before it even got a chance to be established. Existing satellite phones were definitely not competitive, and unlike Starlink, work while moving.

 

Anyway there really isn't much to discuss on the topic of caps. If you think they're a good thing, I have a bridge to sell you. They are always bad, and if an ISP wants' to different their services, they should be doing it based on the size of the bandwidth pipe. If you give someone a really wide pipe instead of a straw, they will use their "bandwidth cap" in moments instead of minutes. That's what ISP's count on you doing.

 

Do I need more than 100mbit? Not really, because a lot of the services being provided don't push 100mbits either. Downloading a 200GB game via steam or Epic is ridiculous, but that's pretty much where we are now. Do I think it's worth paying more money to download it in 2 days rather than 5 days? Maybe. But I can't name something I needed to download "right now"

 

 

 

[Bensemus]

19 hours ago, Kisai said:

Anyway the more we see Musk work, the more we realize he only does things to destroy the competitors in the space, and once they're gone, it's back to acting like an idiotic monopolist. SpaceX? Destroy NASA. Hyperloop? Destroy California HSR.

There is zero logic here. SpaceX isn’t competing with NASA. NASA is SpaceX’s largest customer. They just recently got like $4+ billion in contracts from NASA for two Starship launches to the Moon and something like 6 more crewed missions to the ISS. SpaceX’s actually competition is companies like Boeing who has yet to compete a single crewed mission to the ISS, despite getting paid over a billion more

 

Hyperloop was a crazy idea brought up to challenge that HSR project. It’s the slowest and most expensive HSR on the planet. However despite that it’s still being built. Hyperloop didn’t even stop it for a second nor was any progress ever actually made on hyperloop. None of Musk’s companies are working on it. SpaceX did have a test track for a while but they got rid of that years ago. There are some completely unrelated companies working on hyperloops but they have made little progress. 
 

your two examples are terrible. You have no idea what you are talking about. 

[Franck]

On 11/5/2022 at 8:25 AM, ZetZet said:

I can't imagine living with a 1TB limit, but I guess for "mobile" internet it's pretty good. Personally I go over 2TB every month. 

That is wasted bandwidth. 2 TB is about :

1000 hours of movies  => 720 hours in a month so if you don't sleep, eat, shower, bathroom break you can't go through this amount

35,000 hours of music => That about 4 years of music non stop

240,000 average size books => 11,000 years of reading

600,000 pictures => If you enjoy watching each of them barely 10 seconds non stop that still over 1 month

[Donut417]

21 minutes ago, Franck said:

That is wasted bandwidth. 2 TB is about :

You would be surprised what multi person household can use. Some of us dont sub to cable TV because its prohibitively expensive. You also have people who have multiple game consoles and gaming PCs, Have you seen the size of games and updates now days? Also Ive seen people on DSLreports.com using like 10TB or more. 

[Spindel]

On 11/5/2022 at 1:25 PM, ZetZet said:

I can't imagine living with a 1TB limit, but I guess for "mobile" internet it's pretty good. Personally I go over 2TB every month. 

I can't imagen living with a data limit on my home internet.

 

It has never been a thing where I live and hopefully will never be a thing here.

 

For the record I usually have a data usage of 300-400 GB/month according to my router (the past 30 day period was 312,84 GB).  

 

[IPD]

2 hours ago, Donut417 said:

You would be surprised what multi person household can use. Some of us dont sub to cable TV because its prohibitively expensive. You also have people who have multiple game consoles and gaming PCs, Have you seen the size of games and updates now days? Also Ive seen people on DSLreports.com using like 10TB or more. 

And rightfully, those people should get throttled or similar by their ISP's when demand is high.

 

There's a difference between having a petabyte of traffic spread out over a million subscribers--and having a petabyte of traffic spread out over a thousand subscribers.  And at the end of the day, users who never come close to a 1TB cap shouldn't be having their service kneecapped when demand is high--because ISP's aren't allowed to throttle the most demand heavy of users.

 

I'm in favor of a graduated system of data use--where those whose demand is highest end up with pricing higher than the "nominal" rate would be for a given bandwidth. 

[Donut417]

4 minutes ago, IPD said:

I'm in favor of a graduated system of data use--where those whose demand is highest end up with pricing higher than the "nominal" rate would be for a given bandwidth. 

In my opinion if an ISP chooses to cap users they should legally have to put a physical meter on your home and be regulated like a utility. They should also have to beg a utility commission to raise rates. 

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, Bensemus said:

your two examples are terrible. You have no idea what you are talking about. 

The argument of the coward pops it's head up again. If you want to offer a counter point, offer a counter point.

All we have is proof that Musk is hellbent on destroying competition by playing the loss-leader game grocery stores play, except on a much wider scale. Once there's no viable competition, jack the prices up until people abandon the service.

 

California HSR was always viable, "building more tunnels" that only fit a single car instead of an actual transit vehicle was stupid. Cybertruck? Stupid. It's not street-legal. Where's the SpaceX man on the moon huh? That hasn't aged well.

https://time.com/5628572/elon-musk-moon-landing/

This is from 2019 "Elon Musk Told Us Why He Thinks We Can Land on the Moon in ‘Less Than 2 Years’"

 

It will be kind of hilarious if Starlink fails because customers just find wired internet cheaper.

[wanderingfool2]

14 minutes ago, Kisai said:

It will be kind of hilarious if Starlink fails because customers just find wired internet cheaper.

 

Starlink is intended for places where connection isn't really guaranteed, there was a quote too lazy to find it where it was said by SpaceX they weren't intending to compete against modern wired connections.  You also seem to ignore that some people literally have to pay way more for a whole lot less.  The example I like to use, I worked in an area where the best connection we could get was a T1 line which cost a lot more than what Starlink is doing.

 

Not sure if my other post where I replied was deleted, or if I had missed hitting the post button...but you are literally making an arguement about data caps based on highly biased accounts of a single person, and stating things that are wrong.

 

This is meant for users who can't realistically get good quality internet, so those people would very unlikely be using it in the same way where it's streaming TV all day long etc.  If you wanted things like downloading games and such, all you would have to do is shift to downloading it after peak hours...or again, this is based on congested areas...so if you aren't in a congested area you don't really need to worry much anyways as you won't really be throttled (and if you are being throttled, then you have the right to effectively pay a premium to not be throttled).

 

22 minutes ago, Kisai said:

The argument of the coward pops it's head up again. If you want to offer a counter point, offer a counter point.

You say that, but you are the one who brought it up and then refused to read his beginning bit of the post which completely justified why it was terrible.

 

Your claim, SpaceX destroyed NASA.  NASA was already contracting out by the time they won awards.  They contracted to Boeing Starliner, they contracted to SLS.  Both of which have failed spectacularly.  If SpaceX wasn't a thing, NASA would be required to fly on Russian Rockets; and likely a lot more questioning about their budget.  Literally billions more would be wasted by NASA's budget because Boeing wouldn't have had the pressure to deliver (and they would be charging the government for each time it gets delayed...it's what they are doing with the SLS...they really didn't do it with Starliner because there was thoughts that NASA was considering axing that program).  You say coward pops into your head, but you are the one who made a baseless claim.  If you think SpaceX destroyed NASA then you better well back that up because as @Bensemus clearly pointed out they didn't destroy a thing.

 

Again, Twitter was losing advertisers well before Musk entered the fray (including putting it next to pedophile posts, which caused another mass of advertisers to leave).  Did some leave because of Musk?  Probably, but it's not nearly what others are implying.  A lot of the bleeding has occurred over the last while because as it has been coming out Twitter has been incompetent with it's content moderation (and the fact that their numbers have been pretty much shown to be manipulated).

 

Either way though, those points you were making doesn't apply to this.  It's clear that Starlink has limited bandwidth, and when you have a few customers in place who are taking up a vast majority of the available bandwidth, you try to limit those people because it allows the majority of the customers to utilize the connection. You offer the ability to purchase at a higher rate though because it would allow them to be compensated for not selling as many terminals in that area (there are already places where they don't really offer the service to more people).

[BabaGanuche]

17 minutes ago, Kisai said:

It will be kind of hilarious if Starlink fails because customers just find wired internet cheaper.

Well if they were counting on that it was never going to work. If you have wired/fiber internet available Starlink is not for you. Starlink competition in NA is Huges Net and Viasat, not wired internet. And given the massive difference in number of satellites they can offer way more than either of them ever could.

 

[IPD]

3 hours ago, Donut417 said:

In my opinion if an ISP chooses to cap users they should legally have to put a physical meter on your home and be regulated like a utility. They should also have to beg a utility commission to raise rates. 

They don't need a meter.  They have software to monitor your usage.

 

And yes, ISP's should be regulated like utilities.  That's one of the points about Net Neutrality--which 15 years later...I'm still shocked isn't a thing yet.

[Quackers101]

10 hours ago, Bensemus said:

None of Musk’s companies are working on it. SpaceX did have a test track for a while but they got rid of that years ago. There are some completely unrelated companies working on hyperloops but they have made little progress.

sort of, the boring company is still messing around with it and a recent "test". but as you say, virgin and others are more into it.

[Arika]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

It will be kind of hilarious if Starlink fails because customers just find wired internet cheaper

Oh man, it would be so funny having to go back to 7mbps down and 0.6mbps up from starlinks 250 down and 40 up, because that is literally my only other option for almost the same price because they are a monopoly in my area.

 

Not everyone lives in a place that has access to "real" internet. But sure, let's celebrate starlinks downfall because Elon is a bit of a douche. 

[Kisai]

7 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

This is meant for users who can't realistically get good quality internet, so those people would very unlikely be using it in the same way where it's streaming TV all day long etc.  If you wanted things like downloading games and such, all you would have to do is shift to downloading it after peak hours...or again, this is based on congested areas...so if you aren't in a congested area you don't really need to worry much anyways as you won't really be throttled (and if you are being throttled, then you have the right to effectively pay a premium to not be throttled).

 

No. Starlink is marketed at being for "anyone", there are no competitors for satellite internet. Or do you think  this is really intended for everyone https://satellitephonestore.com/service-iridium-go

vs

 

2 hours ago, Arika S said:

Oh man, it would be so funny having to go back to 7mbps down and 0.6mbps up from starlinks 250 down and 40 up, because that is literally my only other option for almost the same price because they are a monopoly in my area.

 

Not everyone lives in a place that has access to "real" internet. But sure, let's celebrate starlinks downfall because Elon is a bit of a douche. 

If the "wired ISP"'s would do what they were legally required to do, there would be no need for Starlink to exist in North America. But no. This product is marketed as though it was cable internet. Complete with imposing caps for no reason what-so-ever.

 

You can make the argument that wireless bandwidth is consumable, but these throttles are not on the wireless side of the equation, they're on the device-side. That's how satellite tech works. You rely on the users to behave, because if anyone doesn't, they wreck *everyone* on the service. 

7 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

You say coward pops into your head, but you are the one who made a baseless claim. 

There is a penchant for people on this forum to want to win an argument by invoking ad hominem personal attacks. All that proves is that they have no argument at all.