Viasat Satellite → [general] Large Familys and FAP

It's been 10+ years (and 6 or so kids) since I was last on (Hughes) satellite in central Ohio. Now we're in NE Oklahoma and satellite looks to be our only reasonable option. We've been on cellular via Sprocket, but they sold to us without checking a coverage map, and realized a year later that they shouldn't have sold us service. At least they're letting us out of the contract with no ETF.

At any rate, with 3 teenagers, 3 smartphones, 4 iPods, an iPad, three computers and 4 game consoles, can we really get by with a 15Gb cap? I know (and the kids know) that they won't be gaming online any time in the next few years. But there's a lot of YouTube videos played during the day. As I consider our online usage though, other than game updates and videos, that's really about it for heavy-duty browsing. Nobody livestreams anything like TV shows or even Pandora. Just forums and Instagram and YouTube.

Any large families here getting by on satellite? What have your experiences been? I don't know that I ever got fapped when I was on DW/Hughes before. How badly do they throttle you? I seem to recall that they don't publicly announce the throttle amount, but what's been the practical result?

I have an adult son and a teenage son and me and my wife. We have 3 smartphones belonging to the adults and a netbook for the boys and two desktops for me and my wife. We had the lowest small business plan on HN with a 500 MB cap per day for many years and fapped only rarely but we now have exede 12 with the 15 GB cap and we are now sitting on 4.6 GB left to get us through the next 8 days and someone besides me or my wife used over 1 GB in the last 24 hours alone. With this said, if you can be very stern as I am (just took away the netbook till our bucket refills) then you can get by but my advice would be to go up to the next package if you can afford it at all. It seems much harder to control the usage with the monthly cap and it is something I am going to have to work out.

One of those Cisco's Business routers (around $150.00) either controls speed or bytes used...just something I scanned a year or so ago.

I put the town you list in, doesn't look like you are in a Verizon area. But it does look like you are in a Sprint 3G area depending exactly where you are. If coverage is not overloaded there, you might have more options. Not with speed, but maybe more data, less latency.

»millenicom.com/coverage/
50GB if the service is good with the "unlimited" or BYOD plans.

I don't know about "Clear" or other options. Clear looks cheaper but I don't know much about it, needed an address to check. Sprint doesn't service here so I never looked into it.

Don't know what towers the service you had used, if Sprint you'd already know how it was.

Of course if you are not close to town you may not have service.

Sprocket told me they used Verizon towers, but that doesn't make sense, since VZW doesn't service Muskogee (although they service Tahlequah, not far away). US Cellular covers Muskogee as does TMobile and ATT.

Thanks for the link. Turns out we're only eligible for the basic plan. I suspect it's our location on the hillside.

With internet kids, unless they are fully aware of cost per Gig, cell providers will keep on charging as usage climbs.

Sat providers cap it, so you know your monthly payment.

I'm sure there are thousands and thousands of parents who got "that bill." Last time I heard of one, it was only $300.00

Does anyone have a clear or concrete rule for what the throttled rate is? I hear from a couple of places that HughesNet cuts your speed by 1/2 for the throttled period, but I haven't found any references for an Exede speed cut.

»Re: [Exede] Exede - Still can't get a straight answer on cap pen

Some posts have suggested higher speeds are possible...

Last Updated February 15, 2013

"If at any time your data usage exceeds the data allowance and you have not purchased additional increments of data, ViaSat may significantly slow and/or restrict your service, or certain uses of your service, until the end of your monthly measurement period."

»www.exede.com/documents/ ··· licy.pdf

I /do/ know the modem symbol rate drops, and I also know that the modem actually has to reset during LNFZ if you're in DAP to unrestrict it, and reset again once LNFZ ends to re-restrict it. I don't remember the exact speeds on the symbol rates, but from 0 to 1 GB over, it's a faster rate then once you're 1 GB over DAP.

I would think Modulation/Coding being used is a function of dish-diameter and weather condition.

Speed rates could be controlled via Ethernet (NIC) in SB-2 unit. Ethernet flow control is an old topic. And speed rates for various internet activities can be controlled by ground based equipment, like that Cisco traffic device they have....aka congestion management practices.

There are user based software programs to control an user's speeds, btw.

Each SB-2 unit on uplink is ""Operator configurable up to 10 Mbits/s."

So using Modulation/Coding is not needed when other means exist to reduce up/down speeds.

Really appreciate the responses here. Y'all have been helpful. I think I'm leaning toward Hughes though as I think the daily reset will be better for us in the long run.

If you're thinking of Gen4, it resets monthly just like the Exede 12 service. Unless you need help from the installer in selling you a Wi-Fi router at an inflated price and then setting it up for you, you're just going to be paying more for less with Gen4. And also, unless HughesNet has changed something since the last time that I have checked, the DHCP server in the HT1000 will limit your family to 5 devices. (This has already been discussed on the HughesNet forum. There's a way around that by using your own DHCP server.)

Oddly, I just found time to reply to your original question. HughesNet has actually done the research for you on what you can do with a gigabyte:

»www.hughesnet.com/index. ··· -Options

(You might want to do a screen capture or archive that in some way. I'm not personally posting the screen capture on a competitor's forum.)

Some general tips on satellite Internet are to use ad blockers and flash blockers: »[Exede] Exede-5 & Adblock Plus

Also, with my old HNS7000 system, I began noticing that some pages were taking 1-2 minutes to load. I eventually tracked down the problem as being caused by tracking software. I installed Ghostery on my browsers, and that reduced the load time down to 20-25 seconds. Blocking all of the tracking junk also reduces your data usage. This article seems reasonably impartial, and also explains the cons of even blocking tracking software: »www.digitaltrends.com/we ··· hostery/

I settled on Ghostery since I generally use Opera, and Ghostery is actually supported on Opera. The mass of data being uploaded was quite noticeable when the Exede-o-meter was adding uploads to my data usage. I tried to support Ghostery by enabling the "Ghost Rank" option (which anonymizes the tracking data), but that sent my download/upload ratio shrinking down to 2-3 : 1

Finally, since you mentioned youtube, whichever ISP you decide upon, be sure to set the video quality to as low as is tolerable. (If you select 240p, youtube will popup a "Never play high quality video" option.)

That's a tough call...on the one hand, it builds "character" when one has to find another activity for a week or so...on the other hand, its same old pattern of internet usage, delayed a day.

It would be nice if Exede had OPTIONs to choose from....and their defined policy should spell out some form of relief, like 125 Kbps service.

But, Exede is a high speed network, and slowing down users who have been DAPed may create extra loads.

My understanding is Hughes is a slower service these days...so maybe one is between a rock and a hard place in this matter.

Having six kids or so...if all are into internet activity...means discipline will have to be in control. Which means no videos, ftping...etc...just plain old web surfing with programs like Adblock and Flashblock (FireFox Adons) installed on all computers.

In other words, it appears the solutions are, imho:

1. Move back to town

2. No Internet at home

I found the info on Cisco's Router: RV120W Wireless-N VPN Firewall

Configuring the WAN Traffic Meter - "If you want to limit traffic to or from the router, you can specify a size limit. When that size limit is reached, traffic is prevented from entering or exiting the router.
Enter a number, in megabytes, in the Monthly Limit field."

There are other options there,...like once limit is reach, only email can be passed thru.

Also, with this feature, "Under Traffic Counter, select Restart Now, or Specific Time, and enter the time you want the traffic counter to restart," one might be able to do a daily reset...RTFM...might.

»www.cisco.com/en/US/docs ··· dmin.pdf

There is a WISP dealer based in Muskogee:

»www.dataflys.com/

If you know how to manage two ISPs, I'd go with a low end plan using both WISP and satellite.

The only other idea that I can think of is that the kids help pay for a business solution from HughesNet.

cmhbob,

The great news about our satellite services is that on Exede, we provide a truly free data usage time slot. Between Midnight and 5AM every night, we give you the Late Night Free Zone (LNFZ).
This is perfect for families that are up late at night with multiple devices/users on the network. It's also great for setting up download schedulers for program updates, or heavy downloading/uploading of files. If you have other concerns you can email me at exedelistens@viasat.com with your name and phone number and I can help provide more insight into this. Thank you.