It’s not necessary to go through MotoSat as your HughesNet VAR just because you buy their dish. Quite a few VARs resell the MotoSat equipment and are more competitively priced on the HughesNet service than MotoSat. We go through a VAR who gives us a discount for annual pre-payment, and we end up paying $66.50 per month for a plan with a 500 MB/day FAP limit. (We also bought our ancient F1 dish used, for less than half price.)

That translates to 15 gig per month, but only, of course, if you can throttle your usage such that you don’t accidentally exceed the rate threshold.

Also, as noted, traffic is unlimited during a nightly window, which has recently been expanded to five hours, from 0200-0700 Eastern Time. A free download manager such as FlashGet will allow you to easily schedule your big downloads for this window.

We’ve found that we generally have no trouble staying within the limit. That said, we did lock down our (formerly freely shared) Wi-Fi network after Hughes got more aggressive with the FAP policy. We discovered that our occasional neighbors had no concern for getting us FAPped

Now we open our network on a MAC-by-MAC basis only when asked, and then only after the anti-FAP lecture. If you end up parked in our signal footprint, just ask.

-Sean
http://OurOdyssey.BlogSpot.com

Although it is painful when you get ‘FAPped’ it’s not as painful as being charged for overage. 1. it only lasts for 24 hours 2. during that 24 hours you do still have Internet access, too slow for any good stuff, but enough to get your email. I did a video about FAP you can watch at: Geeks on Tour just click on the link to Bandwidth Limitations (FAP) on Satellite Connections.

Thanks.

Keep in mind that 200MB/day is 6GB/month and 375MB is 11GB per month. EVDO is 5GB/month with every carrier I can think of. And of the two choices, I’d rather have my connection choked than to have overage fees start appearing on my bill at rates in the neighborhood of $500/GB!

Thanks for the response. My main drive towards satellite is concern over access in the west. We recently spent two weeks in Montana and access was spotty at best. Since we intend to spend a good bit of our time in that part of the country, it seemed that satellite would be the best choice, even if it does require extra time at work so that we can afford it.

But…then i found out about the “Fair Access Policy”. It looks like you can have limits as low as 200mb download / day. With the penalty for going over the limit being that your connection is choked down to nothing for 24 hours! Looking at MotoSat’s website it appears as if the base $80 / month plan will get you 375 megs / day but I’m still a little worried.

I guess you are correct, there are bandwidth limitations with either choice. Question is…which one can I live with

Rene: Thanks for your response. I have been browsing though your blog as well over the past few weeks and noticed that you had chosen to go with satellite. Thanks for the additional feedback and keep the posts coming!

Brent

We work on the road as well, and about 95 percent of the time, our dish works just fine for our needs. The other 5 percent is usually when we have trees in the way and can’t connect to our satellite, or when weather is really bad and our signal is too slow. There have been a couple of occasions where our dish has needed repairs that Jim couldn’t do, and those were a hassle. Our RV warranty covered them though.

Jim and I both love to boondock in very remote places, in areas where we often don’t have cell service but can get online. We don’t use Skype with the dish though, due to the latency issues.

I think EVDO would be fine if you don’t plan on getting too remote and can be near cell towers. But out here in the west, there are lots of places without towers, and we’ve been really grateful for our dish.

Keep pursuing your dream to hit the road, Brent. Hope to see you soon!