Hughesnet broadband internet service for residential customers has various plans, each with a different bandwidth limit. While this approach is very poor from a marketing and customer satisfaction perspective, it is not fraud. Just very BAD marketing.
I can hit my daily limit in an hour or so and for an extra 10/month I can buy an additional fraction of an hour a day with an upgraded plan. Heres the kicker... Once the limit is reached, the service is limited to a crawl for 24 hours after the limit. (Much slower than dialup.) The effect of this is that I am paying for say 250MB a day an I hit the limit just before midnight. The service is then slowed down for 24 hours after the limit is reached!
The fraud comes in because they advertise 250MB / day but only allow HALF of that at broadband speeds if the limit is reached near the end of a day! This is my big legal beef.
My frustration comes in because the policy is just plain bad from a customer satasification perspective. We are not commertial usesrs with a need for garenteed performance and a known daily amount of usage as the sataliate information network has been based on in the past. There may be a day where I want to download a single TV Show from itunes (that I paid for) but two more days where I just send email. I CANNOT download a single 1h hour long itunes TV Show with the home of pro plan beacause the daily threshold is reached.
My suggestions for Hughes net are:
1- Eliminate the 24hour denial of service after the limit is reached. Change it go back to normal at the end of the day. This will make it no longer fraudulent advertising.
2- Have a guarantee of so many MB per day but if the system has capacity for more, allow for more. If it is out of capacity, slow down the customers who are over the limit UNTIL there is capacity again (but not longer). The poloicy of Hughes net seems to be to 'punish customers' to adjust their behavor. This may work with children but not with paying customers. They will end up loosing them.
3- Slow the service down a tad. It is misleading to advertise very fast data rates when they are so fast that the daily data limit is reached in an hour or so when trying to download a paid for TV Show. This aspect is like a bait and switch. They advertise that they can go fast but then customer support tells you that their network can go that fast for too long and it is 'UN FAIR' when you do. Hence their fair use policy. It is double speak to try and turn their issues around on to paying customers.
I live away from cable and DSL lines. I have offered the phone company 60/month for DSL if they add it to our local office. They couldn't believe the high cost and limited data from Hughesnet when I told them about this.
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