Starlink UK Customers Complain of Broadband Speed Throttling UPDATE
Some customers of SpaceX’s popular Starlink broadband ISP in the UK have started reporting that their download speeds are being throttled, often to around 50Mbps, when they hit a certain threshold. So it’s perhaps no coincidence that they’ve also launched a ‘PRIORITY – 1TB‘ plan for £180.
Customers in the UK typically pay from £75 per month, plus £449 for the regular home kit (standard dish, router etc.) and £20 for shipping on the ‘Standard’ Starlink package, which gets you unlimited usage, a monthly contract term, fast latency times of 25-50ms, advertised downloads of c. 50-200Mbps 25-100Mbps and uploads of c. 5-15Mbps 5-10Mbps (speeds may change as the network grows).
Starlink tends to adopt different approaches to package design and traffic management in different countries, which partly reflects issues of access to ground stations, access to spectrum and so forth (i.e. we’ve seen data caps and throttling being used in some other countries before). At the same time, the provider also needs to be making a profit from what is an incredibly expensive network to build, which is a tricky thing to do without either raising prices or placing more restrictions on network capacity.
Advertisement
The aforementioned context is important because it may help to explain some of what UK customers on Starlink’s Standard package have recently been reporting via Reddit. But we should stress that, at the time of writing, this seems to be impacting some UK customers, but not all.
Example Starlink User Complaint 1
“I’ve had my starlink for a couple of weeks now and it looks like we’re all being throttled to 50Mbps if we download anything for more than 15 minutes.”
Example Starlink User Complaint 2
“Damn, found this post by accident but this is happening to me too. My speedtest.net is over 200Mb here in rural Aberdeenshire but right enough the throughput reduces to slightly over 50Mb when downloading large files even though it starts off well over 150Mb for the first ten minutes or so.”
Example Starlink User Complaint 3
“I was finding it hard to believe all the posts myself so I thought i’d try downloading a 10GB file a couple of times:
https://lon.speedtest.clouvider.net/10g.bin
Sure enough, 15 mins, I go from 200Mbps to a hard capped 50Mbps.”
However, we note that UK customers who try to order Starlink’s service today are now also being offered a ‘PRIORITY – 1TB‘ package option for a whopping £180 per month (unaffordable for most homes), which we suspect may be partly related to the issues being reported above. The service description now describes both plans as follows:
Standard Plan
Standard service for typical residential customers at one location. This plan assigns an unlimited amount of “Standard” data each month to customers.
Priority – 1 TB
High-speed, priority service for high demand users at one location, includes public IP and priority support. After using 1 TB of Priority data, continue receiving unlimited standard data. Priority data is given network precedence over Standard data, meaning users will experience faster and more consistent speeds.
In addition, Starlink has weakened the performance definition of their Standard plan. Until recently it advertised downloads of c. 50-200Mbps (now reduced to 25-100Mbps) and uploads of c. 5-15Mbps (now reduced to 5-10Mbps). By comparison, PRIORITY offers speeds similar to what Starlink originally launched with – downloads of 40-220Mbps and uploads of 8-25Mbps.
In fairness, the operator does apply a general Fair Usage Policy (FUP) too, but this is one area where the operator may be at risk of clashing with the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). This is because Starlink largely only make vague references to “network management measures, such as temporarily reducing a customer’s speeds, to prevent or mitigate congestion of the Services“.
Advertisement
The ASA has long since effectively prevented UK broadband and mobile operators from imposing more than “moderate” throttling on packages advertised as offering “unlimited” usage (or similar terminology) – see details. In practice, this approach makes it very hard for any ISP to throttle traffic – outside very generalised measures – while also promoting an “unlimited” service, as Virgin Media, Lebara and many others have since found.
ASA Statement on Unlimited Terminology
Unlimited claims are likely to be acceptable provided that:
➤ The legitimate user incurs no additional charge or suspension of service as a consequence of exceeding any usage threshold associated with an fair use policy (FUP), traffic management policy or the like; and
➤ Provider-imposed limitations that affect the speed or usage of the service are moderate only and are clearly explained in the marketing communication.
So, marketers will no longer be able to use a fair-use or traffic management policy to slow down legitimate users, nor will they be able to impose an additional charge or suspend the service. A policy which does not affect the majority of customers but impacts significantly on a small number of heavy users is unlikely to be considered “moderate”. In 2013 the ASA upheld complaints about several companies that offered “unlimited” data but imposed limitations for exceeding the threshold of FUPs
Naturally, the question of whether or not Starlink is actually now throttling ‘Standard’ users in a more aggressive fashion remains to be answered (i.e. it could just be a network bug or temporary issue), which makes it difficult to know whether the ASA’s rule would even apply.
Likewise, the fact that Starlink promotes a download range of 25-100Mbps may also work in their favour, since 50Mbps is above the minimum. But individual customer experiences do count for the ASA too, and the fact that Starlink keep downgrading the advertised speeds is another potential bugbear for the ASA.
Starlink never seems to respond to our comment requests, so we’re unlikely to get a clear answer from them directly. But if those impacted find that the issue continues, then it might be worth dropping a complaint into the ASA (here), although they do tend to take the best part of about half a year to reach a conclusion.
Advertisement
UPDATE 12:56am
Some of those affected by the issue are now reporting that the throttling has stopped, or at least been tweaked to be less annoying.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« Gov Launch New £7m Fund to Test UK Rural Broadband Solutions UPDATE
Some of the farmers that i know tried this but its just not reliable . Not worth the high price and they have huge regrets now . Particularly in bad weather which frequently we have in the UK its just not worth it . Hardly surprising reading this article that the speeds are being throttled back
“Some farmers that I know” lol
Cant see anything wrong with this comment . I could refer to them as clients but i kept it relevant to how they use their service
If it is important enough to the business that it can’t fail then it needs a backup connection, even if that is a 5-10Mb connection from BT with automated failover to the slower connection when the faster connection fails.
This is exactly what I have for my fully remote home office. The cost of such equipment is in the few hundreds pounds range and the warranty on such equipment is usually 5 years plus. All tax deductible.
I am guessing that all of those affected people can’t get more than 10Mbps in normal circumstances so they should be still happy IMO. I am a nerd transferring VM backups from and to my home twice a week ~500GB in total having it capped to 100Mbps.
Did you mean “can’t get more than 100Mbps”, rather than 10Mbps?
I read it as, can’t get more than 10meg from other ISPs (ADSL, mobile etc), so being slowed to 50meg while not ideal is still much faster than they could otherwise get
I meant 10Mbps, exactly as Martin understood.
Not really. Their ISP introduced arbitrary throttling in an attempt to upsell them. They’ve every right to be annoyed even if it’s still their best option, much as those on Virgin Media did when throttling was introduced to them.
But it looks like only part of users have this issue. Probably those downloading internet which may be against their fair usage policy and this is why Starlink imposed this.
Wow not sure what is worse, uneducated tripe from people who think they know the service. OR the uneducated tripe from thems who are on the service!
End of the day Some people in congested cells got throttled, and majority of them are in the USA and Canada. No one in the UK has complained yet, me included.
It’s people getting it in a congested cell and then whinging that the congestion affects them.
Regardless they may be able to do this in the USA but most certainly can’t do it here – they have to explain their network management and throttling.
The suggestion of it being due to congestion doesn’t work – reasonable network management doesn’t involve throttling people in the middle of the night due to their hitting an arbitrary limit. The download would be slow throughout under congestion, not suddenly and abruptly drop after a set period. It’s really not difficult to tell shaping from regular congestion: shaping is consistent, congestion isn’t.
Charles: you seem to be speaking from a position of authority. What is that position?
This why BT and government claims of satellite broadband to those allegedly hard to reach areas (hmm some are classed as that despite being mainland near cities or towns) should be rebuked….
I would say this explains why I had a small questionnaire on my Starlink app this morning, asking how my internet experience had been for the last 24 hours, it gave four categories with up/down thumbs: Browsing, Gaming, Video Calls and Streaming and to select only those that I had used.
Video streaming had been affected at the weekend for me but assumed it was just congestion after the recent £99 offer. Maybe I should have ran a speed test at the time to compare as speeds were the usual 150+ again this morning.
the £99 offer did not upturn a massive amount of new customers – maybe 200 or so in the UK. Nothing to worry about
I’m seeing 150mbps even after downloading 50gb this morning.
I think they implemented some traffic management and have now rolled it back, as performance is back to normal levels.
I typically download about 3tb a month without issue.
I did 3.5TB last month and did a lot of game downloads often 250-300GB in a day – had no issues
This can’t be legal if people are still under a contract and have had the definition of “standard” unilateraly changed
No one is under a long contract with starlink, everyone is rolling 30 days.
I’ve experienced this throttling behaviour as someone who took advantage of the rural discount offer starlink had. Set it up last weekend and it’s pretty clear when the throttling sets off in, going from ~250 mb/s at max to 50. Still quite a bit faster than my wired connection although probably not the most suitable for low latency applications. We’ll see where they end up with their traffic management since I can understand that behaviour for highly prescribed areas, but not for the UK when no service cell is filled.
the 1TB plan along with the 5 and 6TB plan have been out months – also I get no throttling at all. Enjoying 250-350Mbps most of the day on the North East coastline
People are suggesting behaviour has changed so potentially this is being tweaked. They should ideally be prioritising people rather than a hard throttle, with folks having prioritised best effort until they hit their limit then onto best effort.
That’s reasonable network management in the UK as long as the product purchased reflects the amount of prioritised capacity received.
It looks as though someone is testing things out starting with a very blunt instrument which is a no-no in the UK without more information being provided to customers.
They do – Regional Mobile is at the bottom Best Effort – then Standard is above and so on and so on. Although some people have even seen this throttle when paying through the noae for Priority Data.
I have always had SL as a backup – I haven’t used it for about a week – tried earlier and got throttled. A lot of people pointed out Steam but I was using XBOX
As long as they’re transparent about it I don’t see the problem, a variable light plan for casuals and more expensive/faster plans for business would seem appropriate.
Absolutely. The lack of transparency is the thing.
I’m not surprised at this and I don’t trust anything from Elon Musk.
You shouldn’t conflate the individual (who can be rather… errr… “divisive” in his opinions) with the products his companies sell (which overall seem actually quite good for the use case they were designed for…)
There does appear to be truth to this.
Speedtest while my connection was idle @10:44am
https://www.speedtest.net/result/14831133052
Speedtest while downloading via Steam @10:52am
https://www.speedtest.net/result/14831159080
Throughput stats from Starlink dish:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/YWoH1uYfUg3FKUHB8
You can see the download throughput wobbles as both flows (steam and speedtest) @10:52 are shaped to 50Mbps combined.
The QoS being applied does seem sane as it didn’t impact latency dependent flows (Google Meet with ~30 participants) while Steam continued to be throttled to 50Mbps.
I’m not a heavy downloader and I’m happy to have a stable 50Mbps as long as dishy can see the sky.
That said it was nice to download at >100Mbps two weeks ago.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/1D9851PEp8Pm1Hft8
I noticed a drop in speed about a week ago. I don’t trust most providers to I run a speed check automatically several times a day and database the results. I have only had SL for for about a month and when I fist set it up I was getting speeds of between 100 to 250Mbps. On the 1st of July at around 9am the speed dropped to 50Mbps and has not got any faster since that date.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/BvF1qTFRTsTaxEWk9