When you've got a captive audience (like say, rural broadband customers with no other options), you can get away with a hell of a lot. Just ask Hughesnet, a satellite broadband company that's managed to stay in business despite offering consistently sub-par service to customers for much of the last few years. Not only does HughesNet service come with low caps (misleadingly called the "fair access policy" or FAP), the users who violate those caps face being throttled to below dial up speeds (between 7 and 14kbps).

Even when well within their FAP limits, our users have consistently complained that they very rarely get the speeds advertised. Reviews for the service by our users here highlight the dysfunction, with many users complaining of no way to escape long-term contracts should HughesNet not provide the advertised bandwidth. Two customers are at the heart of a new lawsuit against the carrier for low caps, poor service, and unfair contracts:Despite the usual claims of how these suits are just "lawyer candy," they do occasionally result in better contract terms, lower ETFs (which was the case with AT&T, Sprint and Verizon), and sometimes better service. While HughesNet has struggled to provide the bandwidth they promise customers in their advertisements, both HughesNet and WildBlue are jointly pushing satellite broadband as a perfect solution for rural America in the hopes of obtaining Federal funding. Existing customers will tell you that's not a particularly good idea.