Can anyone recommend a good plugin or tool to help limit bandwidth while browsing the net?

We have recently had Wild Blue installed and I have found that staying within the FAP may be difficult. This is a family of 3 internet users that have been accustomed to cable or DSL internet access. At first I thought 17Gb transfer downstream would be more than adequate as long as we avoided large downloads. But I am beginning to realize that with so many people using it simply browsing the net can become a problem with large images and ads being loaded. And of course the occasional file download.

I have heard of applications that will prevent images from loading unless you specifically request them and load pages from cache unless they have been modified since last viewed. But in the past I never had reason to pursue them. Also, I have installed Adblock Plus (we use firefox in most cases as the default browser) but was wondering what else could be done to spare as much of our limited transfer as possible.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Very quiet........as Satellite users does no one face this same issue?

Good bye.

Sorry you've had no response but maybe no one has any suggestion for a plug in.  I don't know of any.  If anyone has suggestions please say.  If you have a router between your LAN and the Wildblue then the router may have a traffic monitoring facility.  If you have a spare PC you could run PRTG and monitor the LAN traffic in/out of the Wildblue port - or even each PC IP address up to a max of 3 devices in the free version.

A protective firewall/cache hardware device works well for internet cafes and similar business networks.  See https://www.satsig.net/guardianbox/guardianbox.htm

Just using certain settings on your PCs can help.

For IE consider:

Tools, Internet Options, General, Settings, Temporary files and select Never or Automatic.

Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, Multimedia, delselect "Show pictures"

Tools, Pop up blocker.  Turn it on.

There are similar settings in Firefox, particularly the turning off of image downloads.

Set all your default emails to plain text format and ask people to send to you in plain text format also.

Compress images before you send them and request any images emailed to you to be compressed first.

Send and receive emails and newsgroups once per day at 4am.

Turn off automatic acknowledgements.

Turn off automatic updaters, toolbars and similar spyware.

Using a caching device (e.g Guardianbox) download new versions of frequently visited web pages at night in readiness for the next day.

Best regards, Eric.

I did a search on the web for "free download manager throttle downloads" and came up with a pretty good list.

It seems several of these download managers allow you to set a maximum speed for downloads.  This should help you stay within your FAP.

Note, I haven't personally tested or used any of them.

Pat

You might also consider moving up to a plan with more bandwidth.  For example, we offer "Enterprise" plans targeted for business users with usage levels up to 48 gigs per month.

You can find info on the different plan levels for Enterprise offerings here:

Talk to your current Wildblue provider/partner/coop about these options.

-Dane