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Bringing Broadband Internet to Cyprus...

Fair Access Policy (FAP)

Official Hughes Description
To ensure equal Internet access for all HughesNet subscribers, Hughes Europe maintains a running average Fair Access Policy (FAP).

Fair Access establishes an equitable balance in Internet access across satellite broadband services by service plan for all HughesNet customers regardless of their frequency of use or volume of traffic. To ensure this equity, customers may experience some temporary throughput limitations. This policy applies to all service plans including "Unlimited" plans.

HughesNet system usage data indicates that approximately 5% of subscribers are responsible for a disproportionate share - often as much as half - of the total HughesNet service traffic. Unfortunately, many of those subscribers are not using HughesNet for its intended purpose. To ensure that all HughesNet subscribers have fair and equal access to the benefits of the Satellite broadband service, HughesNet has enacted a Fair Access Policy to prevent abusive consumption of bandwidth by a handful of users.

FAP is straightforward: based on an analysis of usage data, Hughes has established a HughesNet usage threshold well above the maximum typical usage rates. When a customer exhibits patterns of system usage which exceed that threshold for an extended period of time, the FAP may temporarily limit that subscriber's throughput to ensure the integrity of the system for all HughesNet subscribers. Typically, the restrictions will be lifted if the customer's usage in a given period stays below the FAP threshold

   
What does THAT mean?  

Each service plan has a monthly volume limit – for instance, our Home 500 plan has a limit of 1,500Mbytes and our Business 2000M plan has a limit of 25,000Mbytes.

Hughes never disconnect your service or charge extra for data used beyond the limit of your individual Service Plan – however, they do throttle your connection once you exceed certain limits. This is how it works using our Home 500 plan as an example.

Firstly you need to use your imagination a little…

Think of a ‘bucket’ that contains the data you have used across the satellite connection – both uploaded and downloaded data goes into the bucket. You can see that as you browse the Internet, download files or send/receive e-mails the bucket slowly fills up.

Meanwhile, the bucket is being emptied at roughly the speed of a 56K dial-up modem. So, if you download a file from the internet it goes into the bucket and then drains away again. Simple.

The way the throttling works is that Hughes monitor the state of your ‘bucket’ (we give you a tool for monitoring it too) and when it gets to 36Mbytes the connection starts to slow down. Ultimately, if you keep downloading your speed is limited to the speed at which the bucket is being emptied – 56K.

In normal use you will rarely see the throttling take place – you use some data and the bucket empties again – it is only really on large file downloads that the throttling comes into place.

So you are not really limited on a daily basis as to how much data you can use.

If you exceed the monthly limit (1,500Mbytes in the case of the Home500 package) the following month your service is restricted to 12Mbytes in the bucket before throttling takes place.

However, on all service plans data uploaded and downloaded outside of central European Business House (after 9pm and before 8am Cyprus time) does not count towards your monthly limit.

In practical terms you should never see any limitations on your service unless you are attempting to upload or download very large files...

  

 

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