FAP

Those who live in rural areas and can't get DSL or Cable may know what FAP is.  It is a satellite Internet service providers way to keep on user from hogging all the resources of the satellite so other users can't get decent throughput.  Satellite (like cable technology) actually have users share the bandwidth provided by the technology. This is not a serious problem for cable companies, since they transmit a such greater speeds than Satellite companies - about 10 times faster.  


So when a satellite ISP users uses too much resources, the satellite companies put them in a penalty box - called Fair Access Policy.  What happens is  they throttle the abusing user to a very slow speed - almost worst than dial-up. This may last 24 hours or longer depending the the satellite company.  


I work for a company in rural Western PA. The fastest speed internet we can get is using satellite technology. We pay for 2 meg download speed, but we get somewhere between 800 kbytes to 1.2 meg download which is typical for this type of service.  Yesterday, we had an employee decide he wanted to watch the US open tennis match live video feed while at work. Just before closing, we were put in FAP mode. Access to the internet slowed to a crawl.  Needless to say this was concerning.  Being the tech guy, I got the privilege to determine and communicate what happened to the owner.  The next morning as the store opened for business and other employees were asking what happened to our internet access, the employee, much to his credit, admitted what he did. He either played stupid really well or got a case of dementia for his excuse was:" I didn't think it would do that!"  


Well, Duh!