Starlink Trial - Exceeded Data Usage - No Internet

[JonnyAlpha]

Last Sept we started on a two year trial through the DfE Technical Standards Dept using Starlink as our ISP.

Up until now we have had a stable good Internet Connection.

Today our Internet stopped working, technically it's still working albeit at 1Mbps 🙂

 

After emails to and fro to our IT Sp and Clarus (the company that the DfE used to roll out the trial connections), it would appear that wef 01 June 25, Starlink changed it's terms and conditions so that any connection that exceeds 1000GB of data useage will have bandwidth capped to 1Mbps unless you pay for a data top up. Prior to that you simply rolled onto an unlimited contract until the end of the month when everything reset.

 

Th issue is, as we are not an account holder (as we do not pay the bill - the DfE do), we were not notified of this change. It would also appear that either the DfE were not notified or if they were it was missed!

 

We are now in a situation where we have no Internet!!

 

The DfE are now attempting to sort out the issue, so I will await the outcome.

 

Has anyone else been caught out with this? 

[Blue_Cookeh]

Sounds as if the DfE dropped the ball on that one. Clarus sent out very clear communication before this came in, we made sure we told them we wanted to be automatically billed for extra data

[JonnyAlpha]

53 minutes ago, Blue_Cookeh said:

Sounds as if the DfE dropped the ball on that one. Clarus sent out very clear communication before this came in, we made sure we told them we wanted to be automatically billed for extra data

Are you on the trial? Or just have a Starlink Clarus contract? I wonder if Clarus sent something to our office and they just overlooked it? 

[Blue_Cookeh]

We're directly with Clarus - I just checked and they sent us two emails about this, one in March and another a month later in April so there was plenty of time to act, hence why I assumed it was the DfE that's dropped the ball in your case!

Edited June 20, 2025 by Blue_Cookeh

[JonnyAlpha]

12 hours ago, Blue_Cookeh said:

We're directly with Clarus - I just checked and they sent us two emails about this, one in March and another a month later in April so there was plenty of time to act, hence why I assumed it was the DfE that's dropped the ball in your case!

I believe the breakdown in communication was between the DfE's account manager and Clarus? End state is we now basically had no Internet Friday and probably Monday / Tuesday? 

[PaddyNewman]

I would assume this is business Starlink? I average 5-8TB a month on home usage and I've not been restricted, very annoying that Starlink did change this though and can appreciate the problem it puts you in. Weird that non personal ones are being targeted but I guess business = you have more money = we'll take it. 

[JonnyAlpha]

1 hour ago, PaddyNewman said:

I would assume this is business Starlink? I average 5-8TB a month on home usage and I've not been restricted, very annoying that Starlink did change this though and can appreciate the problem it puts you in. Weird that non personal ones are being targeted but I guess business = you have more money = we'll take it. 

5-8TB a month are you data mining 😂😅

[PaddyNewman]

Just a heavy user to be honest, lots of downloads, a heck load of streaming. Game updates are 10s of gigs a pop, it eats data fast. This month I look to have used 3.1TB according to my router but 3.5TB according to my usage counter in grafana so...it's 3.something with a week left. Id be upset if that cap spreads to residential!

[CMare]

Just following this thread - has your internet been restored yet?

[JonnyAlpha]

2 hours ago, CMare said:

Just following this thread - has your internet been restored yet?

Not yet - still basically offline.

 

If the DfE don't sort this out, I presume we will be back online Tuesday 01 Jul 25, however will be in the same position towards the end of July - although we will break up for the Summer around then. 

 

End state is it still needs to be sorted!

 

Are you on the same trial? 

[Primus]

I'd be telling DfE if you're not back online by lunchtime tomorrow you're going to the press, I'm sure Schools Week would love a story like this...

[CMare]

13 hours ago, JonnyAlpha said:

Not yet - still basically offline.

 

If the DfE don't sort this out, I presume we will be back online Tuesday 01 Jul 25, however will be in the same position towards the end of July - although we will break up for the Summer around then. 

 

End state is it still needs to be sorted!

 

Are you on the same trial? 

Thanks for the reply, I am not on the trial, but just interested as I have heard a few similar stories. I'm from Orbital.net - and we always inform our customers automatically when they reach 80% and include a failover of either wireless fibre of 5G with our satellite solution. Really sorry to hear you are going through this and I hope you manage to get back online quickly.

[psydii]

13 hours ago, Primus said:

I'd be telling DfE if you're not back online by lunchtime tomorrow you're going to the press, I'm sure Schools Week would love a story like this...

I'd think twice before taking that approach. The cap does make it impractical to use a school's primary internet link, but the danger with a public display of frustration is that Starlink/DfE just pull it entirely. This is one of those times where you need the dfe and starlink to quietly agree to a "unlimited for schools" deal behind the scenes so they (StarLink) can continue to jack up prices for commercial and residential users without those customers really knowing that schools get it "for free".  Launching things into space is hard and expensive, and there is only a finite amount of bandwidth, if a customer is using 10s of TB a month, that is 10s of TB not available to other customers... supply and demand, free market economics etc etc.  Making a very public fuss that draw public/investor attention to the deal schools need might well scupper the deal.  

 

For now, this is a teething problem in a trial/new service and should be dealt with through the private channels.

[psydii]

On a technical note, make sure that you have Windows Delivery Optimisation configured, and Apple Caching Service (if you have iOS or macos devices in play), and look into other web caching technologies (its been years since I've had any within my sphere of control, I'm not even sure wither MiTM proxies do caching these days?)

[Primus]

2 hours ago, psydii said:

I'd think twice before taking that approach. The cap does make it impractical to use a school's primary internet link, but the danger with a public display of frustration is that Starlink/DfE just pull it entirely. This is one of those times where you need the dfe and starlink to quietly agree to a "unlimited for schools" deal behind the scenes so they (StarLink) can continue to jack up prices for commercial and residential users without those customers really knowing that schools get it "for free".  Launching things into space is hard and expensive, and there is only a finite amount of bandwidth, if a customer is using 10s of TB a month, that is 10s of TB not available to other customers... supply and demand, free market economics etc etc.  Making a very public fuss that draw public/investor attention to the deal schools need might well scupper the deal.  

 

For now, this is a teething problem in a trial/new service and should be dealt with through the private channels.

The issue is DfE dropping the ball and a school now being pretty much offline as 1Mbps is useless.

 

Regardless of any deal or agreement between DfE and Starlink, DfE have dropped the ball and a school relying on their connectivity has been well and truly shafted. Either DfE get it back on in the interim or they deal with the negative publicity.

 

This is a pretty good example of why trusting DfE on anything technical is fraught with danger.

[JonnyAlpha]

Update

It has been a very frustrating week for all, however we have no intention of going public. 
Apparently we are the only school

on the trial that has exceeded 1TB in a month. And they are interested in finding out how and why. I am struggling to get this information.

Our interim IT Sp who are from a MAT, have said that most of their schools of a similar size smash 1TB monthly, so I’d be interested in looking at the other schools on the trial and see what online tools they are using? 

We started the trial in Sept but did not switch over until Feb (lots of delays in our school with buy Firewalls and upgrading infrastructure).

From Feb usage has gone from around 890GB steadily climbing each month and then on June 22 we hit 1TB and as the cap had them been introduced (without being informed), our bandwidth was cut to 1Mbps.

 

In the portal the telemetry alerts were switched off so I have now set that to on.

 

The DfE have nearly resolved the issue but suggest that, as  this is a pilot scheme we should have some sort of backup. 
So without starting a full blown ISP contract, what back would anyone suggest.

Mobile phone signal anywhere in school is dire, apart from out in our car park. Maybe a mobile solution? 
 

I have asked for quotes from Schools Broadband and Everything ICT (Gov procurement framework) as at some point we may need to switch permanently. 
 

AFAIK we do not have FFTP in our are (North Devon), which is how we came to get on the trial. And it would be a backward step to go back to FTTC.

 

We have Smoothwall Firewall and Filter (On Prem Hardware and Cloud). 
 

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[psydii]

When I had the misfortune of having to run my house of a 4g moden for a few months, the absolute killer was devices failing their updates and downloading and downloading and downloading again.

 

I'd have though the smoothwall should be able to provide reports/telemetry to assist in figuring out what is eating all your bandwidth.

 

(its been a busy month here for driver updates following some changes in windows that necessitated releases and tweaks, and if you have adobe updating from the cloud (rather than an on prem update server), that can also knock the numbers up a bit)

[JonnyAlpha]

Update

Back online now 🤣

[Blue_Cookeh]

On 27/06/2025 at 09:44, JonnyAlpha said:

Update

It has been a very frustrating week for all, however we have no intention of going public. 
Apparently we are the only school

on the trial that has exceeded 1TB in a month. And they are interested in finding out how and why. I am struggling to get this information.

Our interim IT Sp who are from a MAT, have said that most of their schools of a similar size smash 1TB monthly, so I’d be interested in looking at the other schools on the trial and see what online tools they are using? 

We started the trial in Sept but did not switch over until Feb (lots of delays in our school with buy Firewalls and upgrading infrastructure).

From Feb usage has gone from around 890GB steadily climbing each month and then on June 22 we hit 1TB and as the cap had them been introduced (without being informed), our bandwidth was cut to 1Mbps.

 

In the portal the telemetry alerts were switched off so I have now set that to on.

 

The DfE have nearly resolved the issue but suggest that, as  this is a pilot scheme we should have some sort of backup. 
So without starting a full blown ISP contract, what back would anyone suggest.

Mobile phone signal anywhere in school is dire, apart from out in our car park. Maybe a mobile solution? 
 

I have asked for quotes from Schools Broadband and Everything ICT (Gov procurement framework) as at some point we may need to switch permanently. 
 

AFAIK we do not have FFTP in our are (North Devon), which is how we came to get on the trial. And it would be a backward step to go back to FTTC.

 

We have Smoothwall Firewall and Filter (On Prem Hardware and Cloud). 
 

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

 

In our case we switched away from SchoolsBroadband to Starlink, deciding to do the filtering ourselves. I'm very happy that we managed to do this for various reasons. I got our filtering/firewalling down to Smoothwall and Sophos, we ended up going with Sophos but as far as I understand Smoothwall can do failover between connections etc nicely too. 

 

We have both Starlink and an FTTC connection from https://www.aa.net.uk coming into our Sophos appliance - the Starlink has honestly been rock solid but the once or twice the dish needed to reboot for updates at 3am our monitoring didn't even detect the downtime when the Sophos failed over to A&A. That slower FTTC connection is also a nice to have since it gives us a small subnet of public IPs we can use for incoming services and our SIP trunks, which I wouldn't want to send over Starlink anyway.

 

This setup seems to work really well for us so far - we've had no complaints, and our staff are happy with the better speeds

 

I'm surprised that the DfE are surprised about your usage - we're a 150 pupil rural primary school, the first month in we used 980GB on Starlink because suddenly everything could go away and do big updates, and I made the most out of patching everything as best I could. Nowadays we hit around 700 - 800GB a month, so I could see how a slightly larger school could very easily go over that TB allowance!

 

Edited July 15, 2025 by Blue_Cookeh