I recently received a notice about HughesNet customers getting FAP’d almost immediately after activation … and without even touching the keyboard.
Here’s part of the notice:
Quote:
“It has been noted by Hughes that a number of third party software downloads occur almost immediately after a high speed internet connection is detected on a new customer’s computer. The file size of these downloads are often large enough to exceed the purchased bandwidth of the service.
While some customers have the ability to disable the automatic downloads in the Windows Operation System, Hughes DOES NOT recommend this as a solution since it will prevent the download of important firewall and anti-virus updates.”
HughesNet wanted to make sure all customers knew about this.
This week, the same thing happened to a new StarBand customer.
I commissioned the modem and tested his connection and then sent the modem to the customer, who hooked it up to the dish already on the roof. The first time he used it, it was very, very slow.
When I called tech support, they said he had been FAPed, but he never got to use the connection before that point. Apparently, automatic updates was the culprit.
It is important to note that this is only likely in the case of a computer that has been offline for awhile and has a backlog of updates waiting for it.
If your computer has been offline for quite awhile, you might want to disable automatic updates before connecting it and then re-enable the automatic updates when the free download time starts later that day.
Personally, I prefer to be notified of automatic updates but NOT have them downloaded and installed until I say it is OK. You will be notified when updates are ready to download and can then choose when to download them.
