For the past several years our family has bemoaned the fact that we were in an isolated little pocket of houses that could not get high-speed internet service. None of the cable companies provide service here, our telephone company does not provide service in this area, and satellite service was financially out of the question for us. This would all be very understandable if we were "out in the boondocks", but we are in a major metropolitan area with high-speed all around us! There were so many great on-line opportunities that we felt we were missing with our limited dial-up connection!
Recently we found a way that we could afford to have satellite internet service installed and be able to budget the monthly expense. We were ecstatic! We could finally do all the things on line that we had previously been unable to do! So, this past week we had satellite service installed. Once it was up and running we had our three computers all happily using the internet at the same time; updating programs, surfing and watching videos, etc. when we suddenly lost the ability to load even the simplest web pages! There was nothing wrong with the signal; we just couldn't do anything anymore! Now what?
We checked our control page and found that we had "exceeded the fair access policy threshold". What's THAT??? Further investigation revealed that we had a limit (determined by our plan) to the number of megabytes we could download in a 24-hour period. Once exceeded, the system slowed our speed WAY DOWN for the next 24+ hours until our system recovered! But, nothing, told us what that "threshold" limit was! So we turned everything off and started waiting out our 24-hour recovery period.
As the 24-hour "recovery period" expiration approached, my husband called the company to get more information about this limitation so that we could determine how to prevent this from happening again. One of the first questions was: what is the download threshold limit for our plan? The answer was 200 MB! We are running 3 computers on this connection so that limit encompasses everything that all three computers do! As anyone who uses the internet and maintains a computer knows, 200 MB is NOTHING!
I think our situation is a little like that of the birds who congregate on the power lines each autumn preparing to migrate to a warmer climate for the winter. I imagine that the immature little birds must think that they'll just jump off that wire and instantly be in a nice warm climate with a lot of food. Of course we, and the older wiser birds, know that the journey will take some time, food along the way may be hard to find, and the birds will have to learn the way patiently, with many stops and re-evaluations. Apparently, our journey to internet abundance will be much the same as we slowly learn to schedule our updates and manage our downloads to live within the boundaries that are set for us.
Hmmm ... boundaries ... now there's another thought .... for later!
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