After increasing the price of connection equipment to Starlink, SpaceX significantly reduced the monthly rate for access to the service. The other side of the coin is that it comes with a speed restriction policy beyond a certain amount of downloaded data.
On Wednesday August 3, 2022, French subscribers to Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite Internet service, received a pleasant surprise by e-mail in these times of generalized inflation. As of this date, the monthly cost of access to the service drops from €99 per month to €50, or almost half as much. “No action is necessary on your part, the price reduction will be automatically applied to your next invoice”specifies the email that we have obtained.
Equally interesting, we learn that the flat-rate shipping and service charges, automatically billed to all new customers, are disappearing. They amounted to 59 €. Remember, however, that last March, SpaceX had revised upwards the price of the expensive hardware pack necessary to access Starlink. From €499, it had risen to €634. An increase which will henceforth be erased in less than three months of subscription.
Speed potentially restricted after 250 €Go/month
While boasting of offering early subscribers “the same Starlink service at half price”this information campaign insists on the opening, next October, of a program called “Fair Use”, intended to “to ensure that as our customer base grows, the typical user’s quality of service will not be adversely affected by users consuming large amounts of data”. In other words, Starlink will ensure that rolling out its access to more users will not adversely affect quality of service.
On paper, this is very good news. But be careful all the same, this policy allows Starlink to introduce new rules of use. The ISP will in fact reserve the possibility of reducing the connection speeds of the largest data consumers during periods when the network will be most in demand. “All users will continue to have access to unlimited data. Users who consume 250 GB/month or less of data will be prioritized. Users who exceed 250 GB/month will still have access to unlimited data, but may experience slower speeds. slower during periods of network congestion”explains the company.
And as everything is a commercial question, we learn that these most greedy users will be able to regain their priority access in 100 GB increments at the price of 10 €. It should be noted that nowadays, reaching 250 GB of consumption per month is not very difficult, at a time when some video games weigh 100 GB and where one hour of streaming in 4K on Netflix represents approximately 7 GB of data swallowed.
Starlink therefore intends to move up a gear in France, where very high-speed deployments continue via 4G/5G networks and fiber optics. Despite everything, there are still many geographical areas of the national territory where only very long and inefficient ADSL lines are offered to customers, or even areas – admittedly sparsely populated – where network coverage is almost non-existent. It is clearly these customers that Starlink will try to solicit, as well as nomads who would like to take advantage of reliable and fast Internet access while roaming (for motorhomes, for example, an option is billed at an additional €25 per month ).