Starlink impose 10Mbps speed cap on heavy users of its “unlimited” broadband UPDATE
Some customers of Starlink’s ultrafast satellite broadband service, specifically those on their residential plans with “unlimited” data usage, have reported that they’ve had their internet speeds capped to c.10Mbps after consuming huge amounts of data. But this is despite their usage patterns being the same for, sometimes, several years.
Starlink currently has around 11,100 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) – mostly at altitudes of between c.340-550km. Residential users in the UK pay from £40 a month for the 100Mbps unlimited data plan, which also promises uploads of c.15-35Mbps and low latency connectivity (c.20ms). Faster packages exist at greater cost, while more restrictive (data capped) options are available for roaming (e.g. £55 per month for 100GB of data).
However, according to feedback on social media (examples here and here – credits PC Mag), some customers who have frequently been exceeding around 5 TeraBytes (TB) of data usage in a month (sometimes up to 8-9TB), as well as somebody else who had daily usage exceeding 500GB for several days, have recently found their download speeds capped to c.10Mbps (Megabits per second) after receiving a “Terms of Service Violation” notice.
Advertisement
Just for some context. The UK’s comms regulator, Ofcom, stated at the end of last year that the average monthly data usage per fixed broadband connection is 583GB (GigaBytes) across “all technologies” (up from 531GB), which rises to an average of 738GB for full-fibre lines. But in this age of 100-200GB video game downloads, 4K streaming and regular software patches, it wouldn’t be hard for a big family to reach multi-TeraByte territory.
Copy of Starlink’s Notice
Terms of Service Violation
Your Residential or Roam service plan is intended for personal, family, or household use only. Business or Enterprise use is prohibited, as outlined in our Terms of Service. We’ve identified activity on your account that violates these terms.
Your service has been restricted for the remainder of your billing cycle. To restore high-speed service, you must switch to a Priority plan, which permits Business or Enterprise use.
As above, the users were advised to switch to one of Starlink’s Priority plans that allows Business or Enterprise use, which would be significantly more expensive for similar levels of usage (i.e. hundreds of pounds per month). At this point it’s worth noting that the wider service does come attached to a vague Fair Usage Policy (FUP), which states that Starlink “reserve the right” to reduce speeds for some or all users to “preserve the integrity and security of the network“, as well as to “prevent or mitigate network congestion“.
Customers impacted by this have been informed by the provider’s support agents that the speed restriction was indeed imposed because their “current data usage is significantly high“, although so far this mostly seems to be impacting users in the USA, Mexico and the odd European country (we’ve yet to verify any UK users receiving it, but that may change as this seems to be a new development).
However, given that Starlink’s capacity can vary between locations, due to things like differing regulatory arrangements and capacity at ground stations, it’s possible the company may not have a one-size-fits all approach to this (their packages and prices do also vary between countries). But unfortunately, their FUP is so vague that it’s impossible to know.
Advertisement
Customers who receive such a message might wonder if they can get around the issue by cancelling and re-subscribing, such as under a different family member. But violations can be attached to the unique hardware identifier of your dish (terminal), which makes it important to try and resolve the issue directly with Starlink.
In the UK the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) does require ISPs to be clear about their FUP limitations and, if they do impose limitations that affect the speed or usage of the service, these must be “moderate only“. Past experience suggests that a speed restriction from 100-200Mbps to 10Mbps on their residential plans may NOT be considered “moderate” (see Virgin Media’s 2013 case).
Just to be clear. The ASA’s guidelines don’t prevent Starlink from doing what they’re doing. But if a UK user were to suffer the speed cap and complain then, based on past examples, the company might have to produce a clearer FUP or stop advertising their plans as offering “unlimited” usage.
UPDATE 11th Sept 2026 @ 7:21am
Advertisement
Some customers who complained to Starlink about the imposition of a speed restriction have now had that reversed, with the provider issuing the following notice: “After further review of the information you provided, your service line is no longer restricted. We have issued a one-month service credit to your account, and I will now be closing your ticket.”
However, the situation does not appear to be the same for everybody, with customers in other countries (e.g. Malaysia) noting that they’ve received no such message and indeed more accounts have since faced the same limits. As usual Starlink has not provided any explanation to help explain their decision making or clarify their Fair Usage Policy (FUP).
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.
« Starlink tweak Personal Maritime Broadband Plan to support bigger boats
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message and display names can be almost anything you like (provided they do not contain offensive language or impersonate a real person's legal name). By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
There can be no logical reason why anyone in a residential setting, even with many family members, needs to download 8-9TB of data a month.
According to OFCOM, the average usage for a UK household per month is 583GB* – so even if you multiply that by six, you would still need to treble that amount again to get to 8-9TB.
Either these users are not using it solely for residential purposes, i.e. they are small business users or perhaps a guest house or similar.
I’m not a business or operate a guest house, but I do have ~15TB on my NAS and if I had to restore a backup (or make a new one), I’d need to use more than 9TB at least once.
This is not to say that I need to use 9TB (let alone 15TB!) every month, but clearly you were not considering how some people use their internet connection when you wrote that “there can be no logical reason” comment.
I’d also like to point out that due to the way averages work, you’ll have lots of people using less than 100GB a month, while others will be using 2 or 3TB. A nice 4K TV and 1-3 hours of content a day uses almost that average in a month (around 500GB, assuming Amazon or Netflix’s 4K bitrate). Something to keep in mind.
Bull. We’re not even a full week into September and my household is already approaching 1TB. Easy to do if you have a couple of gamers along with someone like myself who is constantly playing with stuff for the sake of it…
I use 5TB download and 1.5TB upload on average a month. That’s purely residential, family of 3. I do download a lot of TV and Films though.
I hate this “unlimited”, it’s especially egregious on mobile plans, either put 500GB or Unlimited.
I have site to site VPN with my parents house for backups, just a few weeks ago I needed to redo a backup because incrementals were failing.
That was easily 4TBs right there including the failed backups.
Remember as well, this is a ‘tech enthusiasts’ site, so chances are allot of people here are ‘power users’ who are going to be outside of averages e.g. me, such as benefiting from faster upload speeds.
I bet you also said “who could possibly use more than 640K of RAM?” back in the early-mid 80’s.
Month after month no, but every so often perfectly legit and normal to use a lot of data.
I rountinely smash 50-100TB a month just on web browsing and light gaming, and I’m not a particularly heavy user (porn, torrents).
I disagree I think it’s more than easy to consumer multiple of terabytes. My home as standard ticks over at around 40gb a day, that just watching TV and phones but along comes a couple game downloads and a few series and we are well into multiple terabytes. We have no monitor on our main connection but we do have a 4g backup connection and we have exceeded 5tb in one month on the 4g connection.
I do remote recording of my parent’s CCTV, for (live) offsite storage, thats about 50mbit/s constant, which is approximately 16TB / mo. That’s not running a guest house, or running a business.
Yes, its a fringe case, but thats entirely residential, I’d consider that to be a “power user” or “prosumer”, but still residential. Now, I’d not be doing that over starlink, but the case still stands.
It’s a challenge, as I’m sure there are people flouting the rules and using it for business purposes, but then the question becomes at what point does it become business, is home work acceptable? If home work is, what about someone who works in, lets say the VFX industry vs someone who works in general office work. Offering Unlimited and having a reduction in throughput is fine – if there is a clear and defined plan for when and how much they will be doing it, and I’d make an argument for being able to have a “non-priority” upgrade, where its “whatever’s left” of the capacity, before needing someone to shell out for priority, especially as it may even more more economical for someone to just get multiple terminals and subscriptions, rather than doing the “right” thing of going for the uncapped.
Totally reasonable usage: it could easily be an off-grid guest house in the middle of nowhere where the guests come for the off-grid experience while staying indoors to stream 8K movies all day.
Due to the business packages now having hard limits I suspect many business just order the residential dish and plans. Anyone using that amount of data should be using a leased line.
Surely what the majority of people here want to know is whether or not that 10Mbps is symmetrical?
The answer appears to be no. Having looked at a traffic graph from an impacted service, in that instance it was first reduce to 25/10 for a week, and then further reduced to 10/5. It appears to have kicked in after about 5TB of usage.
About time ofcom clamps down on these “unlimited” claims. They shouldn’t be allowed to say unlimited unless it’s truly unlimited else it should be labeled usage appropriately
Wait until you try one of the Musk products that says it has autopilot…
In the UK we now have Sky Stream and Freely. It’s INCREDIBLY easy to rack up TBs of download in a month, if all your standard TV watching is now over the internet, instead of through a dedicated dish, or an aerial. It’s concerning that they have declared that people are using it for business purposes without explaining what it believes those purposes to be.
This is why I am very against the idea of a Starlink mobile network, he wants a single username for your car, twitter, starlink for the home, starlink for the mobile. And at any point, for any reason, he could just decide to restrict you or turn you off completely.
In this day and age FUP should be measured/enforced separately for streaming/gaming and “Other”, with voice calls/whatsapp disregarded completely.
e.g. FUP for streaming/gaming something like 6 streams for 14 hours per day is “fair” with more requiring a supplement to the package (basically sized for a largeish household, on the assumption that one set of eyeballs can only do one ting at once–I know this is not 100% true but true enough)
and “Other” maybe in 300GB territory.
Whether you’re streaming, torrenting, or trying to mirror Usenet a TB is a TB. FUPs based on traffic type are not permitted on anything that isn’t a mobile network here.
I had no cap imposed after uploading 14tb in a couple weeks to the cloud. I was backing up all of my local data. How can people on here even argue that such high usage should be business related? I just wanted to back up all of my personal photos, videos, files and documents ive built up over the last decade or so.
Anyone using over 3gb on mobile network is abuse I only use about 700mb and anyone use over 400gb a month on home fibre have to much free time I only use 150gb a month max about time we charge per GB say like £3.
Best you stay in the kitchen Claire and leave the discussion to the men.