Internet provider download limit tips?

[BierWiser]

My girlfriend's house is outside of town which doesn't allow her parents to get cable setup at her house. So, they have satellite internet under a provider called Wildblue. The internet is much slower than cable, but it also has a fair access policy. Since the satellite connection is shared by many users, there's a cap on download and upload limits. If a household goes over a certain amount, the internet speed is reduced to bring this percentage down.

http://wildblue.com/legal/WildBlue_Fair_Access_Policy_28-Feb-2008.pdf

So far, there's six laptops in this house. Some people use their laptops more than others, of course. I was just wondering if anyone can give me tips on how others can keep this download limit steady.

Here's a list of things I usually do while I'm at my girlfriend's house.

• Visit forums, very often.
• Open many websites (Reddit/Comics/Forums) at once on Firefox.
• Use IRC under XChat, very often.
• View and save pictures/GIFs, pretty often.
• Upload Youtube videos, sometimes.
• View Youtube videos, sometimes.
• Upload pictures to my website, very rarely.
• Upload pictures to MySpace/Facebook, very rarely.

Here's things that I avoid, but I would like to know how much they'd affect the download/upload limits.

• I don't download music.
• I don't download movies.
• I don't upload anything to my site besides pictures.
• I don't play any online games.

I don't know what others are doing on their computers, besides my girlfriend. The download/upload percentage is increasing slowly, though. It actually went over their limit recently, forcing them to just not use their internet to reduce the roll over download/upload percentages.

Thanks for any information.

 

[noradseven]

Im not sure what there rules are but irc chat hardly uses anything same with IM, even most online games arn't that bad, bandwidth wise, uploading 1mb is normally considered to be similar to downloading like 20mb so there is that, sites with 1 million pics or youtube can be a drain but none of this should destroy your internet make sure nobody is torrenting, if they arn't get a better provider.

As far as downloading goes music isn't bad at all movies can be bad but I mean its not a lot worse than youtube despite the huge quality jump(youtube is compressed poorly), this is assuming you are doing it legally though a direct download site like itunes, torrenting will instantly destroy most internet connection speeds.