The Starlink “Best Effort” service plan will officially cease to exist on January 18th, 2024, according to an email going out to current Best Effort subscribers. Launched in mid-2022, Best Effort was a service plan offered to people stuck on the Residential waitlist. The idea was to give “better than nothing” service to people who were waiting on availability to open up in their area.
Things are much different these days. Starlink recently got rid of the waitlist, so availability concerns are a thing of the past. With no restrictions on availability, Best Effort is no longer needed. Customers with active Best Effort subscriptions will be automatically upgraded to Standard (Residential).
One of the unique features of Best Effort, compared to Residential, was the ability to pause and unpause service. Best Effort subscriptions that are paused on January 18th will be deactivated. If you have a Best Effort subscription that is paused, you will need to unpause it, or change to Residential manually, if you wish to keep service in 2024.
Best Effort subscribers moving to Residential should notice only positive changes. The cost of the subscription shouldn’t change. Best Effort is the same price as the current Residential plan price, $120/month. Since Residential has a higher data priority compared to Best Effort, speeds should remain the same or get better. Overall, Residential is a better service plan for home internet customers.
Best Effort might be ending, but a lot of new things are happening at Starlink. They just recently launched their Gen 3 Standard dish, with more new models expected in 2024. Also, Starlink hit the 2 million subscriber mark in Q4 2023. Executives at Starlink expect that the satellite internet service will make up the majority of SpaceX revenue in 2024.