HughesNet (formerly Direcway) has a Fair Access Policy to keep satellite internet usage fairly distributed amoung all users by severly cutting back the download rate if a large amount is downloaded in too short a time. The "FAP" can stay in effect for several hours.

Most internet use stays well below the FAP limit. However, a few sites, such as myspace.com, stream high-bandwidth audio, video, and animations continuously while viewers are browsing pages. This can invoke the FAP in as little as two hours or less! Downloading several music files in a short time or watching long videos can also invoke the FAP.

Some of the internet users in my household do these things regularly and I often found the FAP invoked and my satellite internet reduced to a slow crawl when I wanted to use it. I created the FAP Defender™ to alow my family to easily monitor the FAP level and be warned when their usage was heading for a FAP. There are other utilities availabe that do this, but none worked the way I wanted. I wanted a program that was simple, clean, easy to maintain, and always on the job no matter who was using the internet from which computer.

FAP Defender™ Features

• Monitors downloaded bytes and signal strength for the DW6000 and DW7000 gateways. (Units prior to DW6000 not supported)
   
   
• Task tray icon showing visual indication of how close you are to a FAP.
   
• Task icon balloon pop-up warnings for three different FAP levels. The warning trip and reset points are user definable.
   
• Direct built-in support for all the different HuhesNet service plans. FAP trigger level and recovery rates are also custom selectable.
   
• FAP Defenders™ syncronize with each other when running on different computers on a local network. The defender with the most up to date information gives it to all other defenders currently running. You don't have to leave all (or any) of the computers "on" for the defender to work.
  
  The account settings, FAP level, etc. can be changed at any defender on any local computer and all the other computers will syncronize with the most current settings either immediatly or next time they are run.
   
• Multiple occurances of the FAP Defender™ running in different user accounts on the same computer will not interfere with each other. Rather one defender is automatically designated as the primary one and it is the only defender to poll the gateway. The rest of the defenders running on the computer get the poll data from the primary defender. This reduces network traffic and computer cpu time.
   
• The defender can be set to start with windows and can optionally minimize to the task tray when it starts. It has true set and forget it functionality.