Caps and traffic throttling are a major reason why the reviews for satellite broadband provider HughesNet are so painfully mediocre. HughesNet customers who exceed the company's daily, rolling bandwidth caps (aka "the FAP"), which range from 200MB to 1250MB depending on tier) find their connections throttled for 24 hours to speeds easily bested by rural American dial-up -- circa 1995 (users say around 7-14kbps).

In addition, users who are well under their FAP limit have been seeing serious congestion during peak hours for months. Customers paying $80 a month for 1.5Mbps/200kbps connections are seeing their lines deliver 101kbps/6kbps or worse. Some users say their speed tests show that the HughesNet network is simply not performing from 4PM to 12AM:The debate currently is over whether this is just organic peak usage congestion, or HughesNet flow control technology kicking in to protect the network from expected strain. One HughesNet reseller in our forums says he's stopped selling new connections, after fielding so many complaints from users about slow peak bandwidth performance. It's clear the added capacity from Spaceway 3 can't get here soon enough.