It’s much like a cell tower where a geographical area has finite capacity. You use your “priority” data that has speed guarantees, then it slows down, but is still unlimited. Apparently some users were reselling the link & maxing out the upload/download 24/7. (yeah, I get it, but in this case some kind of QoS probably needs to happen to turn a profit)
I’ve been a beta user since the first couple months of launch. They’ve had growing pains, but it has overall been light years ahead of our local WISP or Hughesnet/Viasat in terms of speed and reliability. Several of my neighbors have no other option than traditional geostationary satellite providers, and I don’t think any of us every want to go back to 600ms+ latencies!
edit: I just wanted to add that for many people, priority speeds for 1TB & having sub-100ms latency is far, far better than the alternatives.
Comcast has similar traffic caps for many of their plans. It's perfectly adequate for most typical users.
Don't worry though, once you hit your gratuitous 50gb/month limit, they only make your network 8x slower until you pay $10/extra gig... I wouldn't praise Starlink if it wasn't such a steal by comparison.
Either way, I'd say Starlink is an enormous improvement over every other satellite solution I've tried. The lack of data cap alone puts it head-and-heels above the competition, and the speeds are good enough to coax people off 4G. I have some small complaints about CGNAT and the provided router, but the service itself is more reliable than some cable connections I've tried.
Having seen (and tried) a lot of the alternatives, there really aren't any pushbutton services that compare.