As I said before, I’ve spent way too much time dealing with my bandwidth issues and talking about things that didn’t fit my original mold for “Affordable Data”. But I have had a long-open support ticket with Starlink Support to get more information about my data usage, and I want to share my latest message to them as an open letter in hope that they will improve their product/service to help other Starlink customers.
Hi David,
Thanks for getting back to me.
I was able to figure out the source of “invisible” bandwidth usage. It ended up being a scheduled speedtest that was running on my firewall, which was why I couldn’t see it when looking at LAN traffic.
I’d like to pass along some feedback though about the new data limit. First, while I have loved Starlink and I’ve convinced several neighbors to get Starlink and I’ve raved about Starlink at work an online, I’m now seriously considering starting a Wireless ISP to help other folks who also need reasonable bandwidth (50-100 mbps) and don’t have the time to deal with data limits.
I fully understand the need for a limit, and I appreciate the fact that I will also benefit if others in my area are not “hogging” the bandwidth all the time. However, Starlink, the company and the app, has provided essentially nothing to help me be a good Starlink citizen. The only crumb of data I get is a once-a-day update that gives me 2 numbers, peak usage and off-peak usage. Those frankly produce more anxiety than provide help. It’s like knowing I’m going to get a ticket for breaking the speed limit but having no speedometer in my car.
Because I rely on Starlink for my livelihood as a remote employee, I need to ensure I don’t exceed the data limit and end up getting throttled. To avoid exceeding the data limit, I need to know which of the dozens of devices on my network are using the most data and what they are doing. The 2 numbers I get once a day from Starlink do absolutely nothing to help.
If Starlink provided insight into when the peak data was being used throughout the day, it would help. I could map that to people and or device activity. If Starlink told me where data was being sent to or being downloaded from, it would help. That is all data readily available to Starlink and with it, I could figure out that one of the game consoles was downloading a game, or one of the devices was streaming from Netflix, or someone was doing a video call.
Then Starlink could also provide a bit more information to inform me that Xboxes have the ability to get updates from each other, so a new game only needs to be downloaded once. Or Windows PCs can get updates from each other with the same benefit. And Starlink could provide a link to the appropriate website where I could learn how to configure my devices to use less WAN data.
Then Starlink could also give me a button in the app that prevents devices from downloading updates except during off-peak hours.
Because, Starlink provides little help, I’ve built my own system to collect and analyze the data on both sides of my firewall. I’ve figured out that the big culprits are game consoles, streaming, downloads from package repos, video conferences, etc. And I’ve configured devices to share downloaded data, and I have a system to schedule big downloads off-peak, and I’ve blocked game consoles from doing updates during peak hours, and I even have buttons on a dashboard that lets my family manually disable certain rules as needed.
With all this in place I should be able to avoid hitting the data limit. In fact, last month I was able to figure out where my data was “leaking”, stop it, and by putting severe limits on data usage for the last few days we squeaked in under the 1000 GB monthly data limit by just 7 GB.
But it’s taken me hours and hours and hours and a few hundred bucks to set up everything I have, and I feel bad for Starlink’s other customers who need the same type of solution, but don’t have the time, money or experience to build one. This is where Starlink needs to step up and add these features to Starlink to give people who want to do the right thing the tools they need to be successful.
Thanks,
Chris