Starlink, the satellite Internet arm of SpaceX, headed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk who recently acquired Twitter, is about to start slowing some users down. The satellite Internet service provider has announced a new fair use policy, for users who are subscribed to Starlink for home Internet connectivity. Customers who exceed a monthly limit may now experience throttling if they use too much data during a monthly billing cycle. Throttling is the practice of deliberately slowing down someone’s Internet speed to the benefit of the overall network’s performance.
Users who consume more than 1TB of data in a month between 7am and 11pm will be throttled. If customers want to keep getting faster speeds before the next billing cycle begins, they can pay $0.25 (roughly Rs. 20) for 1GB of data, or it’ll be a one-way journey to slowdown town, according to the company’s updated fair use policy.
For individuals who live a certain lifestyle, it is not hard to imagine utilising more than 1TB of data in a month. Gamers, in particular, must cope with game and patch downloads that might reach or even exceed 100GB on a regular basis. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, for example, is a 100GB download on its own, as per a report by Mashable. Meanwhile, The Verge reports that less than 10 percent of existing Starlink subscribers exceed 1TB every month.
Earlier this month, Reuters reported that one of Ukraine’s deputy prime ministers said that the country trusts Elon Musk to continue providing Internet access through his SpaceX rocket company’s Starlink satellite system despite a wobble last month, but is also seeking additional providers.
Mykhailo Fedorov, who was in Portugal for Europe’s largest tech conference, the Lisbon Web Summit, said Ukraine had discussed Starlink directly with Musk and was confident the Tesla and Twitter boss would not shut the service down in Ukraine.
Starlink has “worked, is working and will definitely work in Ukraine”, Federov, who runs Ukraine’s digital transformation ministry, told a news conference in response to a question about the service from Reuters.
