HughesNet says: You're all too slow
Filed under: Home, Technology
It was a great day in the North woods when we laid our 56k dial up modem to rest and undertook the next phase of our Internet entrepreneurial experience, or so we thought. We took the plunge, shelled out half a grand and had HughesNet mount a satellite dish on our front deck. "This'll be great," I told my wife, "We'll finally be up to speed." Little did I know, at that milestone moment, that my blood pressure was going to rise much faster than my download speed has.The installation went fine. The fellow was thorough and adept. With his independent contracting work I have no issue. The problem lies in the service I receive from my new ISP. Suffice it to say that I almost wish I had my dial-up connection back.
Since hooking up to HughesNet, I'm sorry to say, we fail to successfully complete 1 out of 3 page loads. Messages such as "The server is busy," and "The connection has timed out" have become all too familiar trade words.
At first I thought the situation was par for the course. I assumed that our ISP was outrunning the outlying servers. However, that notion quickly faded as I did a bit of further testing and experimentation. It is my conclusion that the problem is specific to HughesNet.The funniest part is that the worst performing page loads are occurring in the highest frequencies from HugheNet's own servers! For instance, the day I write this, I had to make no less than seven log in attempts to get my HughesNet provided email account to twice upload in workable form. Its email software is a joke in itself (although my wife claims to like it). I find it awkward, redundant, crude, unintuitive and boring. It's like something which was hacked together in the 80's by a high school computer class.
The customer service representatives I've talked to have been nice enough, when it can be understood what they're saying. Although they assure me that they can hear me loud and clear, the experience on my end is like talking to someone in the bottom of an outhouse cistern with their mouth stuffed full of wadded up cotton. The fellow I talked to today, whom I believe was in either Bangladesh or Calcutta, assured me they could help out with my problems. He told me that I should call them the next time I had a failed page load. I guess that meant the download failures during our conversation were imaginary or something.
My plan now is simple and straightforward. I intend to keep blogging. You see, I'm a very tough hound to shake. I intend to count failed page loads between our two machines on a daily basis and then occasionally deliver my findings to the public. It's my guess that by the time I come to the end of my two-year contract with our friends over at HughesNet, they'll be only too happy to get rid of me. In the mean time, I'd like my readers to give careful consideration to who they may choose as their next Internet service provider. I would surely hate for anyone else to end up with a bald spot similar to the one I must now be developing.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-02-2008 @ 4:44PM
J said...
Unfortunately I too have been down the Hughesnet less than yellow-brick road. Approximately 4 years ago, I bought a DirecTV/Hughesnet Superdish to the tune of $800+. This brand new, no rebate, no price break satellite/internet combination dish was supposed to solve all my problems. After putting up with the exact same problems you have described for 4 months, I junked the internet side, to the tune of a cancellation fee and held on to the satellite tv side till the end of that contract. Never again will I believe this company, and if you haven't gone past the 90 day get out of jail free time period, I would suggest you bail now. Otherwise, continue to do what you are doing and tell everyone you know, about the shoddy connections, and less than stellar support by the 2nd coming of satellite connection companies.
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4-03-2008 @ 7:37AM
Patty said...
Hughes is the only broadband I'm offered. All dial ups numbers are long distance. I spent months talking with tech support who usually suggested I buy a new modem. Ipay $64/month, and if I watch a couple videos, it seems, that I have used my quota of data transfer for the day and they PURPOSELY slow my connection for 24 hours. They do have a window of 2a-5a Central, but I find everything loads much slower then. I usually have to take my laptop to my mom's to get a good connection. I thought I was paying 6 times a dial up service fee for speed. All I get is headaches, lock ups, and tech support that gets paid by the word to keep you on the phone. Thank you very much for that information that I asked for which pertains to the internet.
4-02-2008 @ 6:00PM
Michael Henreckson said...
Disgusting isn't it? I don't have any experience with HughesNet, but I do have satellite internet at my house. In a rural area we can't get any land-based high speed, so we went with WildBlue Communications.
While the connection is not perfect, it has been very reliable. WildBlue customer service is a little bit unnerving, but the actual internet experience is light-years ahead of dial-up. We went with their top package which is 1.5 Mbps. There is a download limit of 17 GB on a rolling 30 day period. That is a little restrictive for any kind of video or music usage, but it is quite a bit higher than most other satellite providers I have researched offer.
Pages load a little slowly because of the latency inherent in satellite connections, but when downloading large files the 1.5 Mbps is really nice.
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4-02-2008 @ 8:09PM
gerald vaughn said...
I here you about bad companies that sell their services that they know are no good. Take for instance Leisure FItness Corp. out of Delaware. They sold me gym equipment and didn't give me all the boxes to put it together. They then promised to fix the problem but didn't. I sued them and one now they refuse to pay me in a timely manner. Don't ever deal with this company or Keys 2 Fitness also located in Delaware. They also didn't keep their promise.
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7-25-2008 @ 3:14AM
jim said...
i would have to agree. i have had hughes net for three weeks
and spent three hours on the phone trying to cancell there service.
only for them to hang up on me.the speed is about half the speed i get with dial up.then aparentlly i exceeded the threshhold and they slowed it down even more. all the support is in either india or the phlipines or ain a 55 gallon drum.
4-06-2008 @ 12:32AM
Marsh said...
My problem is only 3 weeks old now, flustrating.
I'm a retired Broadcast Engineer with a lifetime
with satellites and electronics.
3pm everyday on time drop immediately to the 70s. My download speed
charts clearly show to the Support, consistent every
day. Midnight cst, speed starts to gain slowly until full
speed at 1:30 am CST
They won't transfer to advanced support, until I complete again 3 days of monitoring speed.
A grade school would ask, why at 3pm cst WHY does
Marsh loose his $83 monthly service
The president of customer care 1-301-428-5500
I will use in 24 hours....
Marsh_0x
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4-08-2008 @ 12:06PM
SB said...
I also have WildBlue Satellite internet. All we could get in our "country" location. Pd $200 for equipment lease, signed 18 mo. contract, waited a month for hookup. We started with the basic package, could not watch video and load time was slow. Upgraded to next level, video was still to difficult to watch and load time still was not desirable. Finally upgraded to top package a few days later, which is faster, though I am still not impressed. Although I don't find problems loading pages, Our biggest problem?? Our service gets cut off by any sign of bad weather and ocassionally even on a blue sky and sunny day! We lose quite a bit of connection time by this making it very hard to run an online business. When I saw the commercial for Hughesnet I thought that might be an alternative...doesn't sound much better, I understand now why a contract is required.
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4-09-2008 @ 7:01PM
micky said...
A big thank you to everyone. I can't get cable even though it's at the end of our private road they won't spend the money to bring it up the road for 5 houses and my land line is antiquated Verizon (used to be GTE) so I am stuck with slooooow dial up. I have often thought of going to HughesNet (was just visiting their web site last night). But after reading all of this I will NOT waste my money. I got to experience DSL last month at a friends house and boy was I envious. I will wait until something proven becomes available. Until then I will continue to delete emails that have large attachments and ignore all links to uTube etc. I feel better knowing that I've saved myself some money.
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4-22-2008 @ 12:02PM
Mark said...
I've had HughesNet for just over a year now - Pro Plan, 1mbps down/250 kbps up.
For the most part I've been satisfied and have only had a few temporary problems.
HOWEVER, sometime in March my evening DL speeds dropped to 90 kbps, after browsing the user groups it seems like many subscribers lose their speed at exactly 1am EST every day, and regain it at 1 minute after midnight.
The concensus is that HN has oversold it's capacity. I'd cancel the service in a heartbeat if there was anything else but dialup available
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4-22-2008 @ 12:03PM
Mark said...
sorry - I meant to say 1PM !!
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4-23-2008 @ 9:46PM
dan mahlman said...
had similar problems I even bumped up to the pro plus plan and it wasn,t much better than dial up. I think they havenm,t got enough satelite capicity for number of users as spees are fairley good between 2am and 700am eastern time but at 6 -7 pm its slow as a turtle phone co finally put 768 speed dsl in for $15.00 a month and it is ten times faster than hughes on a good day. It cost me app. $1000.00 for 6 mos of sorry internet service as I had to pay $300.00 penaslty to opt out early would not recomend them to anybody
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4-30-2008 @ 1:05PM
Ken said...
I had Wildblue for one year. I went with them after some research I thought was thorough. I dropped them after one year and went with Hughes. Wildblue had a much fairer FAP. However, it was up and down for the entire year. Seems my signal came from and went to their office in Syracuse, NY. It seemed anytime there was any moisture in the air there (snow, rain, someone sneezed) the connection either slowed down intolerably, or dropped altogether.
I have had Hughes almost a year now. The first six or so months the speed was better and more reliable than Wildblue, except for the first time I accidentally violated my FAP.
However, since April arrived, speeds slow down intolerably, although the only time I've lost connection totally was when the tornado went through our area and we lost power for an entire day. My speed, according to their speed test page has gotten as low as 14 down and 11 upload.
Doing the speed test throughout the day at the request of Hughes Help Desk resulted in a cycle where it would be about 90% of what was promised for my level (Home office). They claim this is natural dropping of connection speeds as more users get on and then off during the day.
I would believe that, except for the fact this did not begin to happen until April. Something has changed - either they have outgrown their available satellites/bandwidth or they are having other technical problems.
I think if I pay for a higher speed, it should never get down as low as what those are getting who are paying less for less speed.
I am in rural area and cannot get DSL, Cable, or even some of the cell-phone related wifi. If we can get enough people on our dirt road to want DSL, we can get it. But, between you, me, the chickens and the cows, this will never happen.
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5-21-2008 @ 10:57AM
Patty C said...
I have spent days and days of my life trying to get my e-mails to send. i have had this stupid satellite since last August, and still have to maintain earthlink dial up to use email!! This is beyond ridiculas. does anybody know how to get the server to accept my outbound email? hughesnet customer service doesn't have a clue. i'm using the correct address smtp.hughes.net, server requires authentication box is checked, etc. i would love to use my outlook correctly. i can receive email, just not send. i really think i'm going to have to write off the 600.00 start up and the 60 a month i pay and go back to dial up.
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7-16-2008 @ 10:06PM
danny said...
well...............i guess that Hugesnet just overall BLOWS.........
if enyone has eney coments about how i can speedup my internet speed........plz tell me!!!
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