Starlink is effectively halving its monthly service fee for customers in mainland France as part of a new pilot program, from €99 to €50.
While this modification, which is already in place, was made to accommodate as many users as possible, Starlink also revealed plans for an impending Fair Usage Policy to avoid network sluggishness and preserve service quality.
Customers who use less than 250GB of data per month will be given preferential access under this policy, which will go into effect in October. When the network is congested, those who go above this limit might anticipate having their connection throttled.
Despite the decreased speeds, Starlink claims that these users will still have access to limitless data and that they may regain priority access on the network by paying €10 for 100GB more data.
This user priority is simply based on data use and ignores the content provider, according to the company’s email, which was posted on Reddit and reposted there.
Future high-speed data limitations and/or throttling restrictions under Starlink’s Fair Usage Policy may be extended to other nations provided the business receives sufficient customer input from France.
The latter group, especially those who use the internet a much, will probably be disappointed by this development because the restriction wasn’t in place when they first joined up for the program. They will now be required to pay more after their connection has been deprioritized for further blocks of data.
As noted by PCMag, this technique is intended to stop Starlink “Power Users” from hogging the network and would instead favor other users during peak hours, according to Starlink’s support guide for the French market.
These heavy users won’t have their connections throttled when there isn’t congestion; instead, their speeds will be reduced “proportionally” to network usage.
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