Shot's from Kerrville

[Ben]

Tonight I'm getting blazing speed out of my Verizon card (sarcasm):

Download: 47 kbps
Upload: 33 kbps

It's almost painfull to work at these speeds.

[MangoMike]

Sounds like to me ol' Ben is just trying to find a good excuse to justify that datastorm purchase.

I use that approach all the time.

MM

[Ray Davis]

Have you heard any stories about people getting cut off for high bandwidth usage?

Ben,

Satellite access generally has what they call a FAP, or Fair Access Policy. What this means is that there is a limit to how much you can upload or download in any given period. If you exceed that, your account is throttled back to a reserve speed. Generally 4 to 8 hours later you're back to full speed.

The upload FAP is smaller than the download FAP. I think it is designed to stop people from the peer to peer sharing of videos etc, which eats up bandwidth in a satelitte environment.

In looking at the UnaSat brochure (motosat.com), their FAP is 100/700 Mbytes (up/down) in a 24 hour period). You can't download a ton of videos, but generally 700MB is much less than I transfer. Higher priced accounts have higher FAPS, up to 600/5000 MB.


The lower priced Hughes plans indicate they have a 4 hour FAP of 500MB down.


Even if you exceed your limits, you are throttled back for a period of time. You never loose the ability to surf, nor do the cancel your account.

Ray

[Ben]

I just found out that Verizon charged me a $175 early termination fee when they shut down my wireless card. Then I had to sign a brand new 2 year contract to get going again.

If I had the $$, I'd take legal action. They gave no proof that I broke any terms of the contract and they get away with this crap?

[Jon Wehrenberg]

File in small claims court, and then make noise that you will consider advertising to see if the case has merit as a class action lawsuit.

You may be pleasantly surprised at how the filing fees can provide you with hours of enjoyment tweaking a big company's nose.

[Ben]

Well, I'm finally getting OK speed out of my Verizon card tonight... 572kbps down and 104kbps up. That feels like very acceptable browsing speed and downloads are OK. It's very rare for me to get speeds this high.

I'm at Prevost in Fort Worth... maybe I should stay here for a while just to get good browsing activity. That way I won't mind how often you guys post... it's hard to keep up with it all on a slow connection.

Hey, Ray... would a normal sized dish have speeds fast enough to do voice over IP and do you know if that's legal on their plans?

[Ray Davis]

Hey, Ray... would a normal sized dish have speeds fast enough to do voice over IP and do you know if that's legal on their plans?

I've talked to others who have successfully run VOIP, either Skype or Netzero Voice (I think that's it), and they've had pretty good luck with it. A newer 7000 modem and D3 controller on an F1 dish (the small dish) is capable of over 1Mbit download, and enough to work voip upload too. BUT, as with anything, sometimes it works, sometimes it won't on the smaller systems.