Verizon offering 3Mbps

Brian Riley (maillist) n1bq_list at wulfden.org
Thu Sep 9 14:34:01 EDT 2004


NO, what there is is called "Fair Access Policy', implemented in software.
Iwhat it comes down to is you can average 22 MB every hour for ever. You
start off with a 167 MB credit (more for commercial packages which cost more
bucks) and can draw against that as fast as you want, but that hastens the
inevitable. The credit replenishes at a rate of 22 MB per hour. So if you
hop in and dump 167 MB at the 100+ Kbytes /sec rate in short order you will
get "FAPPED" and your download rate shrinks to  4KBytes/sec. Stop and wait
an hour and you could see full speed again for as much as you have
replenished.

Now  the numbers sound small but in actual practice with 2-3 people on my
network here, even my stepson downloading 'tunez' occasionally we rarely run
afoul of the limit. When I want to download a big ISO, I get 140-150 MB in
the morning, then the next 140-150 in the afternoon and so on using a
download manager that lets me stop and cleanly restart.

 The FAP software treats regular violators harshly. If you make it a habit
of getting FAPPED you will find the 8 hour recovery is 12 hours and for
really persistent violators I have heard it gets as high as 24 hours. On the
other hand in the USA we have it good, I understand the European Terms of
Service for DirectWay is you get cut off when you get FAPPED, we only get
throttled down.

Considering that without something like this there is an element that will
hog the bandwidth, its not all that bad and I have found I can live with the
low end. If I need more bandwidth I will cough up the extra 30 bucks a month
for double/triple what I have now.

I live in Chittenden County in Vermont. The state Internet Czar is proud to
tell anyone who will listen that Chittenden has 95% access to broadband ...
I live in the other 5% area, which means politically we are so insignificant
that the red necks communing with the moose up in the Kingdom have a better
chance of seeing DSL or cable than I do. I am just happy to have what I have
now, dialup was a drag!

  Cheers ... BBR

On 9/9/04 7:52 AM, "Jerry Feldman" <gaf at blu.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 08 Sep 2004 23:01:27 -0400
> "Brian  Riley (maillist)" <n1bq_list at wulfden.org> wrote:
> 
>> I have had Direcway bi-directional satellite since April and am fairly
>> happy with it.  
> Isn't there a daily download limit of 500 or 800 MB?





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