Starlink is capping heavy users of its unlimited plans at 10Mbps

Some Starlink customers on residential plans sold with unlimited data have had their download speeds cut to around 10Mbps, as reported by ISPreview, after months of very heavy use. The notice they were sent is headed Terms of Service Violation, says the restriction lasts for the rest of the billing cycle, and tells them to move to a Priority plan, which the report says runs to hundreds of pounds a month for similar usage. A UK residential plan starts at £40 a month.

The obvious question here is whether it has happened in the UK, and the honest answer is that nobody has shown that it has. ISPreview says the reports so far come mostly from the United States, Mexico and the odd European country, and that it has not verified a single UK user getting one of these notices. It also says this looks like a new development. Worth watching, then, rather than worrying about.

How much data are we talking about?

Not ordinary heavy use. The accounts described in the report were running above roughly 5TB a month, in some cases 8 to 9TB, and one was using more than 500GB a day for several days. For scale, the report quotes Ofcom putting the average UK fixed broadband line at 583GB a month, rising to 738GB on full fibre. So wherever the line really sits, it is roughly eight times what a typical connection gets through. Game downloads and 4K streaming mount up faster than they used to. A multi terabyte month is still a long way from normal.

What unlimited is allowed to mean

This is the part that reaches past Starlink. Almost every unlimited package sits on a fair usage policy of some kind, and Starlink’s reserves the right to slow people down to ease congestion without saying at what point that starts. Our guide to unlimited broadband sets out where the limits on a UK package actually sit.

There is a rule about it here. ISPreview notes that the Advertising Standards Authority expects providers to be clear about fair usage limits, and that any limit affecting speed or usage must be moderate only. Its own reading, going on past cases, is that dropping someone from 100Mbps or more to 10Mbps might not clear that bar. That is a view rather than a ruling, and no UK complaint has been tested on it.

So there is nothing to do today unless a notice lands. If one does, ISPreview points out that cancelling and signing up again may not get round it, because a violation can be attached to the hardware identifier of the dish itself, which makes taking it up with Starlink directly the better route. And if you are on satellite because nothing else reaches you, that is worth re-testing now and then: rural builds move, and so does 5G home broadband. Our availability checker will say which networks reach your address today.