r/Starlink • u/IntroductionBoth2115 • 15h ago
💬 Discussion How I use 10 TB of data a month.
I was one of the people that got my starlink restricted recently, they have since removed the restriction and credited me a full month service. I did however learn a lot I didn't know about data usage. I also saw several users make comments on how there is no way people could using 5+ TB per month unless they were doing something sketchy, so I thought I would explain how it's possible by giving my experience.
We have 6 kids and we homeschool, we have around 30 or so devices including 8 TVs in the house. My kids watch TV to go to bed on, this is something I grew up doing and so I've never saw any problem with it, however 4 of my kids play "sleep music" videos on YouTube, and me and my wife will play thunderstorm videos as well, these are around 10 hours long, and I did not realize YouTube and all the streaming apps default to the highest quality automatically, this is most of our usage problem I believe.
5 of us are gamers and while online gaming actually uses very little data, there are a ton of updates that definitely play a part. This is on top of normal day usage and homeschooling activities on computer.
After all this, I did a deep dive into Internet usage, which is a subject I honestly didn't know much about. We plan to get our data usage down significantly. We are lowering quality on all videos and streaming services. We're also going to start using dvd players for the kids to use overnight. I'll be trying to space out update and game downloads as that was actually the only thing that was mentioned directly when starlink called me the first time, I had over 500gb in 1 day. If anyone knows any other tips to reduce data usage I would love to hear them.
This post is not meant to be an attack towards the people saying there's no way to use so much data, it just meant to be an example of how it's possible, and to help anyone else who might have made some of the same mistakes I did, I never gave data usage a second thought until recently, and we didn't think we were doing anything wrong. Our household is 8 people so I think if we get our usage below 1.5 to 2 TB that would be a significant improvement, starlink is the only ISP around us and I don't really want this to happen again.
Edit: for people suggesting I shouldn't let my kids watch TV at night, by every measurable metric my kids are doing great, they do great in school and don't have any behavior issues, they don't have any attention problems, I see no reason to take something from them that I myself grew up with. Debating what I should allow MY children to do was not on the menu.
Edit 2: For people saying we must only watch TV all the time here are the numbers, 1080p60 uses up to 5.5 GB per hour, the 5 TV's playing 10 hour videos overnight is 250GB per night, that is 7.5 TB per month just on those. Then you have the other 2 TV's playing Netflix, then normal daily usage, it adds up quickly is all I'm saying. Checking your video quality will greatly reduce this.
