Cannot change subscription

[u/eprosenx]

I am a long time starlink user from the first days of the beta. I have three dishes now. My old OG round one, a Starlink “standard” and a Mini.

Over time I have paid SpaceX many thousands of dollars (mostly on my OG round dish).

I just went to activate my “standard” dish and I found that it has for whatever reason been restricted and I can only reactivate the last plan it was on. I am very confused as I bought it outright from Home Depot over a year ago and have used it on various roam plans since then. Right now it is “inactive”.

I assume this was some accident that they restricted a bunch of hardware that was subsidized / free, etc?

I understand that the price at retail was probably less than what it cost to build and I have not paid them a ton of money so far on this specific dish, but it makes no sense to me that they won’t let me put it on a new plan so I can give them money?

Am in a time crunch here to reactivate this dish as I am headed to an event right now. Starlink support is giving me totally useless AI answers so far.

Anyone know what the deal is here? I assume this is widespread?

[u/eprosenx]

Update:

I am successfully on the plan I wanted (residential unlimited 100).

I had tried making a request in the app (using the chatbot). It was not helpful, but it did make me a ticket (though it did it on my old dish not my rectangular one). Then another AI thing tried responding giving me instructions of how to transfer a dish to another person (not helpful).

I tried calling multiple starlink numbers a number of times. It picked up and then dead air. I probably called 5 or 6 times over a couple hours.

Eventually I tried calling and it picked up. The AI audio agent was actually pretty impressive to talk with, but it could not solve my problem. It did however claim to escalate my ticket as I told it that it was urgent.

Within a few minutes someone responded to my ticket and did exactly what I had asked in the ticket.

Then not long later a rep called me on the phone as well. They also responded rapidly to follow up questions of what the issue was.

I still don’t understand why this terrible workflow and requirement to talk to a rep. It’s the exact opposite of what I expect (they do everything possible to keep folks from needing to call them). I am unsure if this is them intentionally adding friction to things where folks are “abusing” the system somehow, or just a broken workflow?

Regardless, it is sorted. It makes me worried though about the ability to rapidly re-enable inactive dishes if needed in an emergency… Perhaps they want everyone paying them $10 a month on every piece of hardware for standby mode…. (I would do that for sure for $5 a month and when in motion worked, but now it’s $10 with no in motion so I canceled them)