Starlink Offers Best Efforts Broadband to Resolve Customer Backlog

SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellite service, fresh from trialling a cheaper capped allowance package in France (here), has now begun offering another new service – initially only in the USA – to customers who are stuck on a waiting list. The catch is that you’ll have to accept a potentially substandard (“Best Efforts“) connection.

Customers of Starlink’s normal residential package are usually offered unlimited usage with variable, albeit still fast (for a satellite connection), latency times of 20-40ms (milliseconds), download speeds of between 50-200Mbps and uploads of 10-20Mbps (speeds may change as the network grows). In that sense, Starlink is already a service where performance can fluctuate quite a bit between locations.

However, in some locations customers may have a longer wait time for the service to arrive, which is usually because the operator hasn’t yet been able to deploy enough capacity to serve them (often a combination of ground stations and satellite coverage). The UK doesn’t currently have a big problem in this area, but a big chunk of the USA does, and some customers have been told to wait until mid-2023 before they can be connected.

Starlink has now come up with a new “Best Efforts” solution to help that group of consumers, specifically those with “urgent connectivity needs“, get connected sooner (see Reddit here and here). Customers on this option will pay the same as everybody else, but you can probably expect slower speeds due to a lower traffic priority, which sounds as if it will mostly impact customers during peak periods of network congestion.

Extract from Starlink’s Email

What is Best Effort?

Best Effort enables typical internet activity with the understanding that Best Effort users will be deprioritized behind Residential users.

The monthly service charge is the same but unlike Residential, Best Effort users will have the option to pause service on their account page.

However, raw connection speeds aren’t the only area likely to be impacted, with Starlink specifically stating that “Best Effort users will be able to engage in typical internet activity like email, online shopping, or streaming an SD movie, but they won’t be able to engage in activities like online gaming, video calls or streaming 4K and HD movies.” But this only applies during those periods of high network congestion.

Considering that most HD video streams today only need around 2-5Mbps of download speed, while the actual act of online multiplayer gaming should be even less demanding (excluding related software updates), then this does tend to suggest quite an aggressive level of restrictions. But hay, you can at least stream the latest episode of the Mandalorian in SD video to your 4K TV set, so that’s.. something.

The good news is that unhappy customers will be able to pause the service and not be charged, and they can also unpause it at any time (or just cancel it outright). But given the limitations and the costs involved, you might just be better off waiting for the full service to arrive before taking the plunge.

One other caveat is that if you take and then cancel the Best Efforts service, Starlink will also “cancel your place in line for Residential service.” In that case, pausing would be the wiser move.