| reply to Dogfather
Re: FAP means that have severe capacity problems I think it reflects the fact that there's more rural demand for bandwidth than supply or competition.
FAP to a customer means less than ideal capacity.
FAP to the company means maximizing profits.
It seems somewhat ironic that neither HugesNet nor Wildblue really wants to provide service that is vastly superior to the other because they don't really want all the "power users" coming their way from the other. Ideally they want customers who barely use the service so as to get as much profit per KB transferred and as many customers per equipment as possible. Likewise, they don't want the FAP to be easy to live with because the fear of triggering the FAP probably does more to reduce bandwidth usage than the FAP itself, and less use equals more profit.
It would be nice to have a situation where the two feel they have to compete more actively to attract customers from eachother by providing a higher level of service than the other. We saw this when wildblue first launched, but then when they filled their equipment more quickly than anticipated, it dropped off. Maybe spaceway will change things and we'll see active competition again which could be great for rural customers for whom faster terrestrial broadband still hasn't come along yet.
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Very happy TDS DSL user | Wildblue in Lake Michigan |
