Satellite Broadband Provider Feature Comparison

1. Otherwise known as bandwidth rationing, all satellite broadband service providers wll reduce your bandwidth to dialup or less if you surpass a certain threshold. In the case of HughesNet, it's 200 mb per day for their Home Plan - that's about the size of many product manuals in PDF format and it's far less than a Windows service pack update. It's most commonly called a 'Fair Access Policy' (FAP).

2. Contention factor is a measurement of how many actual or potential processes or individuals may contend for a given resource. In this case, contention factor refers to how many customers are contending for a finite number of available network connections. Low factors are good (100 to 1 or less), high factors are bad (200 or more to 1). The higher the contention loading on the network, the more users are sharing the connection and therefore the slower your service. DSL and Cable providers try to maintain 125-1 contention ratios to deliver a favorable user experience whereas some consumer satellite broadband services operate with contention levels of 300, 400 and even 500-1, delivering a poor user experience.

3. As a rule, Ku band VSATs are less susceptible to weather-induced 'fade' than Ka band systems, but the ones that WildBlue uses are significantly more vulnerable to signal quality problems caused by rainfall.