Astra2Connect ... Fair Use Policy

Astra2Connect provides an 'always on' internet access service and this service is designed to provide a good quality surfing experience with adequate high speed. As the satellite capacity allocated to the Astra2Connect service is shared among all customers, that access and usage is controlled carefully.

A Fair Use Policy exists to stop the system grinding to a halt by heavy downloaders (eg those downloading videos) clogging up the system during peak hours. In order to give preference to normal internet surfing during peak hours, the Fair Use Policy limits the bandwidth for heavy downloading during this period.

Peak Time can be defined as the late afternoon until mid evening on working days ... that's from about 5pm to around 10pm. At the weekends, Peak Time is for most of the day from around 10am to 10pm.

The system continually monitors the volume of downloads per customer in Mbs (MegaBytes). During peak hours, the Fair Use Policy system reduces the speed for those customers who have already consumed large volumes (in Mbs) for that month. The more that customer has downloaded already during the month, the more the speed priority is decreased during peak time. In off peak times, the end-user's speed priority usually has only limited impact on his access speed.

Every month, the customer's account is set to zero and the whole process starts again.

The following tables show the priority settings and related speeds during peak time dependent on the downloaded volume per month for the Unlimited packages from NordNet.