01 SepStarlink’s 30-Day Roaming Rule Means You’ll Never Get a Full Month of Internet Again
Starlink tightened its roaming rules months ago, not this week. The company cut the amount of time a Roam kit can spend outside its registered country from 60 days to 30, with the change applying to existing customers from 17 August. It seems Starlink has now done what they promised to do. A number of users on roaming have reported getting cut off because their kit had been abroad for more than 30 days. It also seems this limit is being applied retrospectively too, this means that Starlink is not just counting from 17 August; they are counting from the last time your kit was sent abroad/last reset.
There are just around 30-31 days in a month. This new rule means that if you are using your kit on roaming, you are never going to get a full month of internet again. This is still the case even if the old trick of switching off your kit for 48 hours still works or not. You are getting 28 or 29 days every month, for as long as the kit stays registered abroad instead of Zimbabwe. It is simply what a 30-day allowance inside a 30-day month adds up to.
Why so many kits are registered abroad in the first place
A sizable number of Starlink dishes working in Zimbabwe today are still not registered here at all. Retailers sell what people call a blank kit, a dish that has not been locked to Zimbabwe. The kit is then registered, often to a country several thousand kilometres away, such as Haiti or Argentina, where global roaming is available. This grew up before Starlink was selling Priority packages directly here, back when roaming from abroad was simply the cheapest way onto the network. That gap has narrowed a great deal since, but plenty of kits bought under the old logic are still out there, registered wherever suited the buyer at the time.
What the 30-day rule actually requires
Anyone travelling outside their kit’s registered country on a Roam Unlimited plan now gets 30 days before the account is restricted, half of what it used to allow, and time already spent abroad counts towards that limit whether you have noticed it happening or not. Clearing a restriction requires one of three things: returning the dish to its registered country and leaving it connected there for at least 24 hours, switching to a local plan in the country you are actually in, or paying for a Priority add-on that buys another 60 days. There is no way to make the 30 days stretch to cover a full month for free.
The practical fix, and who it does not help
For anyone using a foreign-registered kit simply because it was easier to get hold of, not because they actually need to move around, the straightforward fix is to stop paying the reset tax altogether and switch to a locally registered plan. Business Priority, sold directly by Starlink as well as through resellers like TelOne and Aura, comes with no day limit to manage because it was never tied to a foreign home country to begin with. It costs more than a bargain roaming kit ever did, but it is a price you pay once a month, not a countdown you have to manage every few weeks.
That fix does not help everyone, though. A bus company with a kit mounted on the dashboard, or anyone whose work genuinely takes them across borders, needs a kit that can move, and no amount of switching to a fixed local plan solves that. For that group, the 30-day rule is not an inconvenience to route around, it is a real cut to how long they can go before having to interrupt their own operations to reset the clock.
Starlink has since gone further still. It is now rolling out a passport-and-selfie “Global Travel Registration” check for anyone using a kit outside its registered country, on top of the 30-day limit above. We look at what that identity check involves, and the geo-locking logic behind it, in a follow-up piece.
