FAP is a four-letter word.

If it seems that I've been missing in action, I have. I'm being punished by WildBlue for having allowed my computer to download software updates.

Flashback: When we moved out to the country, internet access was one of my first concerns, but (at least initially) it was easier than I thought. Dish network offered broadband internet ('powered by WildBlue') along with the satellite TV service. They hooked it up, and much to my amazement it worked right off the bat on our Macs! Back when we got DSL from Ma Bell, it took a few weeks of phone calls and a service call to get it working correctly on our Macs. Yes, I know, it's a Windows world but I love my Mac. (As crappy and bug-ridden as Vista is and Panther/Tiger/Leopard etc. aren't, who's laughing now?) So, anyway ... the guy who did the installation had the service working, my email coming in and web pages loading about 15 minutes after he finished putting up the satellite dish. Hallelujah!

It worked just fine, albeit a bit slow at times, until we got our first FAP violation notice. This was when I discovered that in amongst the 7 or 8 pages of fine print that I didn't sit down and read carefully when I signed the papers was a Fair Access Policy that limits the amount of data you can upload or download over a 'rolling' 30-day period. I'd been playing with getting movies over the internet so after my initial annoyance I figured, ok, no more movies, that won't happen again. Problem solved? Not quite.

In December of 2007 parts of NE Oklahoma had a terrible ice storm. Perhaps you heard about it on the news.. We were without power for just under a week, from Saturday night 12/8 until Friday evening 12/14. (I'm not complaining, lots of city folks were sans electricity for longer than that, and we had a wood stove for heat.) My point is, when I was once again able to access the internet and get a week's worth of email, one of the messages was from DISH telling me that I'd once again exceeded the FAP. Huh? The email was dated Thursday, 12/13/07.

Now let's see .. it's a rolling 30 day period, so every day it looks at the previous 30 days and tallies up my usage. How could I possibly have exceeded the FAP when I'd had no electricity for the previous 6 days and therefore zero usage of the service? So I called them and explained. The CSR (customer service rep), who seemed to barely speak English, was unsympathetic and assured me there could be no mistake. Yeah, right. I was really mad that time but there wasn't much I could do, and by the time I'd really worked up a good head of steam to "do something about it," we got the notice that it had fallen back under 80% and we were restored to full speed.

The week after the ice storm, we had a cold rainy spell on a Saturday morning that resulted in wet tree limbs previously damaged by ice repeatedly hitting our power lines. Our electric co-op was very responsive and had service restored and the trees cut down in record time, but not before the repetitive brownouts and power interruptions had damaged my computer.

Back to the present: I've finally got the money, thanks to tax refunds and so forth, to get my computer fixed and the OS re-installed. Since I had to re-install the original OS from the CD, I'm now back to 10.4.0 and the current version is 10.4.11. Then there are the Java updates and iTunes updates and so forth.. For several days my computer was downloading and installing some kind of update every day until I was back up to speed.

Then suddenly, this past Thursday evening, our internet pretty much quit working. Our email timed out about half the time, web pages loaded erratically, not at all, or with errors. Then, when I finally did manage to retrieve my email .. there it was .. that FAP violation notice. Friday morning I called DISH again, thinking that if I explained the situation they might help me out. I got lucky in the sense that this CSR actually spoke good English, but other than that it was a bust. Not only did they have me lowered to 70% of normal speed (instead of 80%) but they informed me that this was a punitive reduction that would last for 30 days regardless (instead of being lifted when I fell back under 80% of the FAP during the previous 30 days as had occurred back in November and December).

I have a few questions which they are unwilling or unable to answer:
1) When and where did a company get the idea, much less acquire the ability, to punish its customers for using too much of the service they're paying for?
2) When did the policies change and why didn't I receive any notification that it was changing?
3) How did I manage to exceed the FAP when I wasn't using the service? (during the 12/07 power outage)?
4) How can they charge me $50 a month for a service that is so slow it's essentially non-functional and yet I can't cancel the service without paying a hefty cancellation fee?

I have to admit, however, that they did have a solution for me! Pay just $20 more a month for the next 'level' of service and my bandwith limits will nearly double!

Yep, I see what the problem is now. I'm not paying them enough money. FAP really stands for "Finding Additional Payments."

Caveat Emptor!