Starlink just announced that it will implement a Fair Use Policy for residential customers in the US and Canada sometime in December. Here’s the key bit from an email Starlink sent me:
Under the Fair Use policy, all Residential customers will receive unlimited data, and will start each month with Priority Access, which means their data usage will be prioritized during times of network congestion.
Customers who exceed 1 TB of data use on a monthly basis (currently < 10% of users) will automatically be switched to Basic Access for the remainder of the billing cycle, which means their data usage will be deprioritized during times of network congestion, resulting in slower speeds. Data used between 11pm - 7am will not count towards your Priority Access.
I figured a policy like this had to be coming for Starlink’s unlimited plans. It strikes me as a good approach. 1TB is a reasonable allotment, and heavy users still get good speeds when there’s no congestion. The exemption for data use during the lowest-traffic time of day is particularly clever. Folks with a one-off need to download a big piece of software (e.g., an AAA video game) can plan to do that at off-peak hours and avoid burning through a bunch of prioritized data.
