Musk's Starlink to slow down user internet with daytime data caps

WASHINGTON: Starlink, the satellite internet company of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who recently acquired Twitter, is about to start slowing some users down.

Mashable India has reported that according to Starlink's (the internet division of SpaceX) new fair use policy, folks who use Starlink for home internet may now experience throttling if they use too much internet during a monthly billing cycle.

Throttling is the practice of deliberately slowing down someone's internet speed to the benefit of the overall network's performance.

Users who consume more than 1TB of data in a month between 7 am and 11 pm will be throttled. If customers want to keep getting faster speeds before the next billing cycle begins, they can pay USD 0.25 per GB of data, but otherwise, it'll be a one-way journey to slowdown town. According to The Verge, less than 10 per cent of existing Starlink subscribers exceed 1TB every month.

For individuals who live a certain lifestyle, it is not hard to imagine utilising more than 1TB of data in a month. Gamers, in particular, must cope with game and patch downloads that might reach or even exceed 100GB on a regular basis. 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II,' for example, is a 100GB download on its own, as per Mashable India.