Thank you for your service, up until now, you’ve done a pretty decent job of keeping me connected. However, I regret to inform you that Y****OU ARE FUCKING CHEAP BASTARDS. Thank you for reducing my Internet connection to the lowest transfer rate I have ever seen. Fuck off and die.
I could see where 169 MB (if that is your threshold) is annoyingly low. Hopefully you won’t need to do such large downloads very often. Maybe if you wrote to them with a good case they’ll revisit their policy. (Okay, maybe if enough people wrote. But you’ve got to start somewhere.)
Did you check out the cap thresholds? They’re ridiculous. 170-odd megs in 1-4 hours isn’t excessive use in this day and age; hell, it’s not even moderate use. All well and good ensuring that customers aren’t disadvantaged by the greedy, but those numbers have no place on a service that’s sold as “unlimited”. That’s unlimited like an all-you-can-eat buffet max three fries per customer.
I’ve never seen a cap that’s based on such a short-term definition of high use. Pretty much everyone downloads large files from time to time; that’s what the connection is for. You’re supposed to be stopping people who’re maxing out their connection constantly, not occasionally.
Perhaps. I would guess that Hughes feels these thresholds represent only the top 5% of users, far from the middle of the bell curve. I sometimes need more than that in an hour or two. Just not very often. YMMV.
Good point. I wonder if the benefit to our OP outweighs this downside.
Most every “unlimited” service has limits. In fact, I can’t think of any truly unlimited services.
At 700Kbps, the quoted rate for the home product, 170MB represents half-an-hour’s use. They are therefore effectively saying that if you use between 12.5% and 50% and upwards of your connection’s capacity in any short period, you will be rate capped. There’s something wrong with that, don’t you think? If I download one large file a month, I’m still going to get hit. What’s the point of having a speedy connection if you never get to use it?
Well, no. Clearly not. Downloading one 170MB file simply isn’t heavy usage in this day and age. If they really need to force people to use such a tiny fraction of their nominal capacity, over such short periods, then they have massively overloaded their pipe by cramming too many customers on. If they sell a service advertising nominal speeds of 700Kbps, but in fact force you to use it at rates of more like 100Kbps (barely better than dialup), then they’re guilty of chronic false advertising; they should be selling at a rate they can actually sustain for more than half an hour. If a guy downloading a game patch constitutes dangerously high usage, then the problem is not with the users, it’s that there are far too many users for the connection to cope with. After all, it’s not some internet commune where the peons should be grateful for what they’re given; this is a paid product.
I’m well aware. I’ve never come across one so thoroughly limited, though. The vast majority of fair usage policies examine usage over weeks to establish who the heavy users are; they don’t go around splatting anyone who comes close to using their connection’s full capacity on any given evening. Broadband caps are measured in gigabytes, not megabytes. Really; have you ever seen such a stringent “fair” usage policy?
That’s fucking ridiculous. That’s nothing with broadband. I like to check out shareware demos, movie trailers, streaming shit like youtube or metacafe, hell, some windows service pack downloads are bigger than that. I can do that in less than an hour.
But of course you know that the 5% are running P2P apps.
Actually, at 350k you’d get just over an hour. But your point still stands.
When i saw that the OP was griping about download caps, my first thought was, “Well, he’s probably downloaded 100Gb of music/movies/porn in the past couple of weeks, and is now suffering the consequences.”
Never in my wildest imagination did i think that a self-proclaimed broadband provider would throttle download speeds after a measly 170Mb.
It’s possible that the OP doesn’t have that option. I just looked at the HughesNet site, and it seems that it is a satellite broadband company that markets itself mainly to people who are outside the reach of regular DSL and Cable providers.
For 700 down/128 up, you pay a $400 Equipment and Installation charge, plus $60 a month! Or you can avoid the equipment charge and pay $100 a month instead. If you are willing to fork over an extra $20 a month, you’ll get 1.5mbps down. It’s highway robbery. The only way anyone would ever use such a service is if there were literally no other options. The download caps just make an awful deal even worse.
I’m interested to know where the OP lives, and why s/he ever chose this service in the first place. Surely it was due to complete lack of alternatives?
I have unlimited service. At busy points, my speed goes down to about 150kbs (download) but is normally about 400kbs. I can download all day and all night if I want to without question. This is over an ADSL line too - costs me £18.99 a month (say about $30).
I’ve never had any problem with constant downloading either.
But if you look in the contract or agreement you have with your ISP, there’s a good chance you’ll find a clause saying that they reserve the right to restrict or cancel the accounts of particularly heavy users. That clause is generally there (at least in the US) even for companies that rarely or never actually enforce limits.
I have 5-Mbit/s cable on Rogers in Toronto and I’m capped at 61 gigabytes total download transfer per month… there’s a web page I can check to see total accumulated transfer. So far as I know, there are no short-term transfer limits apart from my plan’s transfer speed and whatever network congestion I may encounter.
There is an alternative satellite service - WildBlue. CBA might want to look into that but that’s another huge equipment charge plus early termination charges from HN unless he can wait out his current contract. And there are FAP thresholds, but they’re way higher than HughesNet’s.
I flirted with getting HughesNet at my cabin but couldn’t get past the cost. The additional speed would be great, but I don’t need it that much. WildBlue looks better and if I don’t get laid off in December I’ll probably go with that.