I've just been looking at this petition which is as follows:
 
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DirecPC must remove their "Fair Access Policy" 
 
As DirecPC Subscribers, we pay very expensive monthly payments for Satellite internet service. Some of us who have the DirecPC ISP Service as well pay even more than a cable or DSL service would cost per month. We expect the best from DirecPC, but with the Fair Access Policy (FAP) we feel cheated. Anytime we download so many bytes within a 1 hour period, the service closes its speed to less than the speed of a 56K modem for hours. This is what DirecPC calls "Fair"? This petition is to get DirecPC to stop cheating all of its suscribers out of their money. DirecPC advertises their service to be unlimited. From experience this only means that its unlimited internet, but no unlimited high-speed internet. This FAP rule needs to be removed, the only reason it exists is because DirecPC is trying to sell service to so many people that their satellite can handle at once, because they will not upgrade their satellites that are in space. We the subscribers want a REAL unlimited high-speed service, that has no limits to what you can download, or at least make these limits more fair to us. If the money we paid was spent on making subscribers happy there would never have been a Fair Access Policy to begin with.  
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My reaction is that there is a big misunderstanding here.  The money paid by users needs to be enough to pay for the service and that means about $5000 per month per Mbit/s.   It is nonsense to seek to have unlimited use at far lower cost than this.    For low cost operation, like $100 per month, you to either accept dedicated low bit rates like 5 kbit/s up and 15 kbit/s down or need to share say 1 Mbit/s total bit rate with 50 others to keep the cost down.  The users need to be sparing with their useage and avoid doing things like frequent large file uploads or downloads, music, video, VoIP etc.
 
Best regards, Eric.

Added May 2006
See also:   New  http://fairaccess.hughesnet.com/  and from Wildblue,  www.wildblue.com/legal/fair.jsp
 

Greg
 
I am going to delete this discussion from the forum and put it in the archive, so I thought I would first add something to round off the minimalistic debate on the subject.
 
Eric