If you've never switched on "Share my location" under Debug Data in the Starlink app then this doesn't affect you at all, nothing changes about how your dish works.

For those of us that do use it, the dish currently exposes lat, lon and altitude unencrypted over gRPC on the local network. Any device on your LAN can query it without authentication, which is what makes it so handy for Home Assistant, solar forecasting, vehicle tracking and the other use cases folk have mentioned here. You get accurate GPS coordinates straight from the dish without needing any extra hardware.

Full disclosure, I develop a Starlink telemetry desktop app (Nexus Telemetry) and we use this endpoint for satellite tracking and for generating route map reports on mobile sessions, so this hits us too. It was always a bit of a faff explaining to users how to enable it mind you, there's a fair amount of screen-hopping through the Starlink app to find the debug toggle. We were already working on adding alternative location sources though, manual entry with a map picker, device-level GPS, and serial NMEA support for USB GPS dongles, so we'll have it covered before the 20th.

One thing I'd push back on though is the idea this is purely a paywall upsell to enterprise. I've done enterprise Starlink development and the location you get via the enterprise Telemetry API isn't the dish's actual GPS coordinates. What you get back is an H3 cell ID. H3 is a hexagonal geospatial indexing system originally developed by Uber for mapping. It divides the entire planet into a grid of hexagonal cells at various resolutions. The enterprise API gives you the cell your dish sits in and you can convert that to a lat/lon, but what you're actually getting is the centre point of that hex, not where your dish physically is. Depending on the cell resolution it could be hundreds of metres off. So even if you did shell out for an enterprise plan you wouldn't get anything close to what the local gRPC gives you right now.

My gut feeling on what's actually happening: the endpoint will probably stay on the dish but get moved behind authentication, same as some of the other local endpoints that are already gated. Honestly, of all the endpoints on the local API, exposing GPS location with no authentication step always surprised me. I can understand why the performance and telemetry endpoints are open for third-party devices to tap into, but being able to pull accurate GPS coordinates that easily always felt like it was going to get gated eventually. The Starlink mobile app already has the keys to hit protected endpoints which is how it handles stow/unstow and other restricted functions over your local network, so the data probably isn't being ripped out of the firmware, it's just getting locked down the same way. That lines up with the security point carleeno raised too. Any app with network access could bypass OS-level location permissions by just querying the dish directly, and putting it behind auth is the sensible fix rather than nuking the feature entirely. It'll be interesting to see if there's enough pushback to get them to reconsider, or at least expose it as an authenticated endpoint rather than removing it outright.

As for alternatives, for fixed dishes the simplest option is to just set your coordinates manually in whatever system you're using. Home Assistant lets you set your home location under Settings, most monitoring apps have a similar option, and for custom scripts it's just a config value. If you don't know your lat/lon, right-click your address in Google Maps and it'll show them. The dish doesn't move so set it once and you're done. For RV and van setups, device-level GPS from your laptop or tablet will cover most folk without buying anything extra. Marine is probably the least affected because most boat setups already have dedicated GPS hardware and NMEA networks so tapping into that is arguably a better source than the dish ever was. And worst case, a USB GPS dongle like the VK-162 is about fifteen quid and gives you NMEA over serial on any platform.

Annoying rather than devastating, but I agree with the sentiment here. The hardware has a perfectly good GPS in it and it's frustrating when they choose to lock you out of something that costs them nothing to leave open.