Capacity Crunch Causes Musk’s Starlink To Sock Users With $100 ‘Congestion Charge’
from the please-pay-us-extra-for-no-reason dept
Analysts (and Musk himself) had been quietly noting for a while that Starlink satellite broadband service would consistently lack the capacity to be disruptive at any real scale. As it usually pertains to Musk products, that analysis was generally buried under product hype. A few years later, and Starlink users are facing obvious slowdowns and a steady parade of price hikes that show no signs of slowing down.
Facing these growing congestion issues, Starlink has now started socking users in some parts of the country a one-time $100 “congestion charge”:
“In areas with network congestion, there is an additional one-time charge to purchase Starlink Residential services,” a Starlink FAQ says. “This fee will only apply if you are purchasing or activating a new service plan. If you change your Service address or Service Plan at a later date, you may be charged the congestion fee.”
On the plus side, Starlink claims that it will also give some customers $100 refunds if they live in areas where there’s excess constellation capacity. But that’s something I’d need to see proven, given, well, it’s a Musk company, and Starlink’s customer service is basically nonexistent. Historically, they’ve been unable to even consistently reply to emails from users looking for refunds.
While low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite is a significantly faster upgrade to traditional satellite broadband, the laws of physics remain intact. There are only so many satellites in the sky, and with Musk constantly and rapidly boosting the Starlink subscription base to boost revenues (Starlink just struck a deal with United to offer free WiFi, for example) you’re going to start seeing more and more network management restrictions you won’t see on fiber, or even traditional 5G cellular networks.
For a while Starlink flirted with usage caps, but correctly realized that such caps don’t actually do much to manage congestion (something we’ve had to point out repeatedly over the years). So they’ve generally shifted to either price hikes or network management tricks to try and ensure that users consistently see relatively decent performance.
But the more militaries, consumers, governments, airlines, and boat owners that sign up for service across a limited array of LEO satellites, the worse the problem will get, resulting in ongoing complaints about degraded Starlink network performance over the last several years. And the more problems, the more weird restrictions that reduce the utility of the connection.
It’s a major reason why the Biden FCC reversed the Trump FCC’s plan to give Musk a billion dollars to deliver satellite to some traffic medians and airport parking lots, instead prioritizing taxpayer funding toward more future-proof, and less capacity constrained, fiber deployment efforts.
Starlink is a great improvement for a niche segment of off-the-grid folks who have no other option. But at $120 a month (plus hardware costs) it’s not particularly affordable (the biggest current barrier to adoption), and even with a fully launched LEO satellite array, capacity will always be an issue. Starlink was never going to be something that truly scaled, but that gets lost in coverage that treats Starlink as if it’s single handedly revolutionizing telecom connectivity.
Filed Under: broadband, caps, congestion, high speed internet, leo, leo satellites, network management, satellite broadband, telecom
Companies: spacex, starlink
Comments on “Capacity Crunch Causes Musk’s Starlink To Sock Users With $100 ‘Congestion Charge’”
I read that starlink was being used by drones for warfare navigation purposes. Maybe there ought to be a war charge.
Surreal Serial Cereal
Captain Elon’s Capacity Crunch surreal. Part of this non-fiber breakfast. Now with more crunch babbles!
There's another emerging Starlink problem
Botnets have been around for over 20 years. Most consumer providers, even most of the crummy ones, have taken steps to mitigate their impact – particularly on mail servers, which means blocking, rate-limiting, filtering, or otherwise dealing with outbound connections to port 25 on Internet systems. (It’s easy for anyone who runs a mail service of modest size to see this in action: all they have to do is look at their own logs.)
Starlink apparently hasn’t done anything – or if they have done something, it’s completely ineffective. As a result, attacks against mail servers originating from Starlink-connected systems are steadily increasing, and as a result of that, the collective patience is wearing thin. If Starlink doesn’t solve this problem in the near future, it will be solved for them.
Re:
Don’t worry, if Trump is elected he’ll fix the congestion and bot problem on Starlink in one day!
I need my eyes checked
I don’t know why, but when I saw the headline my mind immediately read it as “Cap’n Crunch Causes Musk’s Starlink To Sock Users With $100 ‘Congestion Charge’” and I was really curious how a cereal was causing problems for Starlink.
I’m not sure which is more sad; that I misread the title like that or that the notion Starlink being bothered by a cereal was believable to me.
It’s not just that they don’t work, it’s that people hate them. And they get the sense that the service is not to actually be used unless absolutely necessary, which hurts the service providers in the long term. For example, when they’re trying to sell their own IPTV service, and people’s number-one concern is “but what about my data cap?” It’s like going back to the 1970s, when long-distance calling had to be rationed.
I recall staying with my parents one Christmas, along with some siblings, and having my father announce a few days in: “no more downloading till the new year; we’re very close to our December data cap right now”. That event got them looking at competitors (there were none at the time, because they were about a kilometer outside the DSL service area; but they did eventually move to the other side of that boundary).
'Here's worse service AND a $100 fee.'
“In areas with network congestion, there is an additional one-time charge to purchase Starlink Residential services,” a Starlink FAQ says. “This fee will only apply if you are purchasing or activating a new service plan. If you change your Service address or Service Plan at a later date, you may be charged the congestion fee.”
‘Starlink Residential services’, or as it should be described ‘false advertising charge’ after they oversold network capacity and it turns out that it can’t in fact offer the speeds and capacity that they sold.
Could I avoid the one-time charge if I go to a jurisdiction where they don’t apply it to buy my dish and then install it myself where I want?
It would probably cost more in gas (definitely in gas and time) to actually do that but would it work?
Re:
No, when signing up you have to specify exactly where you will install the dish.
Re: Re:
On my boat
Elmo…
Pay me more because my super awesome system isn’t actually super awesome!!
Congestion Charge aka Blaming the Victim
for, how DARE those Users reveal Musk’s incompetence!
Starlink capacity increases with every launch
Like cellular phone service, Starlink capacity is only limited by the number of satellites overhead. So, just as the libtards aren’t limited to facts, Starlink’s number of simultaneous connections isn’t limited.