Fair Access Policy (FAP and DW4000 in Europe)
Why Fair Access Policies?To ensure equal Internet access for all DIRECWAY subscribers, Hughes Network Systems maintains a running average fair access policy. Fair access establishes an equitable balance in Internet access across Satellite broadband services by service plan for all DIRECWAY customers regardless of their frequency of use or volume of traffic. To ensure this equity, customers may experience some temporary throughput limitations. DIRECWAY Internet access is not guaranteed
DIRECWAY system usage data indicates that approximately 5% of subscribers are responsible for a disproportionate share - often as much as half - of the total DIRECWAY service traffic. Unfortunately, many of those subscribers are not using DIRECWAY for its intended purpose.
To ensure that all DIRECWAY subscribers have fair and equal access to the benefits of the Satellite broadband service, DIRECWAY has enacted a Fair Access Policy (FAP) to prevent abusive consumption of bandwidth by a handful of users
FAP is straightforward: based on an analysis of usage data, Hughes Network Systems has established a DIRECWAY usage threshold well above the maximum typical usage rates. When a customer exhibits patterns of system usage that 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 DIRECWAY subscribers. These limits may need to change from time to time as new applications become popular.
Typically, the restrictions will be lifted within 5-10 hours of the original application of the FAP if the customer's usage in this period stays below the FAP threshold.
Subscribers are likely to avoid the limitations imposed by the FAP if their use is typical of the majority of Internet users and consists of Web surfing and a reasonable amount of downloading.
How will these affect normal users?
Browsing
A typical complex web page is about 150kB. When actually reading the web page content it might take 30seconds on average before moving on to a new page.
With four users per site it would take 6hours, 8 and 11 hours continuous browsing to reach these limits and this is seen as very unlikely.
Using e-mail
A busy user might expect to download eight e-mails per hour of, say up to 500kB each on average. Downloading this volume of data would not result in throttling of any GoS.
In fact, the data volumes would need to increase by a factor of nearly four before Bronze and Silver GoS sites would be throttled.
Downloads
Everyone connected to the Internet will download information occasionally. A PDF file typically varies between 150kB and 1.5MB and therefore would have very little impact on the calculations already made for normal browsing.
The following table shows some typical business downloads. None of these download scenario that would individually result in the site being throttled.
| Typical Downloads | File Size (MB) |
| Microsoft | |
| IE6 SP1 | 12 |
| DirectX 9.0 end user | 16 |
| Win2000 SP3 Network Install | 128 |
| Office 2000 SR1a | 13.3 |
| HNS | |
| DAK 4.0.1.28 | 11 |
| DAK 4.0.3.9 | 11.3 |
| downloads.com | |
| Kazaa media desktop | 4.7 |
| Winzip 8.1 | 1.7 |
| AdAware | 1.5 |
| ZoneAware | 3.6 |
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