HughesNet Gen5

I am finishing my first month of Gen 5 service after almost 2 years on Gen 4.  (The closest cable internet comes to our home is about 9 miles away).   I called Customer Service on May 4,  the same day I received the email from Hughes informing me that Gen 5 was now available in my area, and I  requested the update.  Successful customer service call!  On May 5 the installer, who came from a town 50 miles away,  arrived right within the promised time window, swapped out the receiver on the Hughes Dish, hooked up the new Modem/Wifi Router combo, activated the system and in less than one hour I was up and running.  

I am overall very pleased with the speed and reliability of the Gen 5 service.  It is night and day compared to Gen 4.   With Gen 4, besides the slow speed, I would get frequent satellite outage errors and would have to wait a few minutes before accessing a web site or receiving emails.  With Gen 5 I have had absolutely no problems.

One very welcome side benefit of Gen 5 is that we live in area with lousy cell phone service and we were never able to use our Verizon cell phones until we drove about 7  miles from our home here on the lake.   (btw AT&T does not have cell coverage in our area, nor do the other national cell phone providers).  The Samsung Verizon network extender  that I bought a few years ago (when we lived elsewhere and had cable internet but weak cell service), is  plugged in to the Hughes Gen 5 modem and  now allows us to receive and place cell phone calls within and in the vicinity of our home. (btw we did try a Wilson Electronics cell booster outside our home but it could not pick up the closest Verizon tower which  is 20 miles away.).   While we still mostly rely on our AT&T land line  for phone calls (the local AT&T land line is  not able to support DSL), as we try and minimize Hughes data use for completing cell calls, it is great to be able to look at the caller ID and answer our cell phones when we want to, and actually be able to speak with the caller.  The Gen 4 speeds were not sufficient to allow the Samsung Verizon network extender to work properly.    With Gen 5 we are finally no longer living in the extreme boondocks. Is it also my imagination or does Gen 5 seem to work better than Gen 4 during thunder storms when clouds are really thick?

So for my first month experience with Gen 5,  I would like to award 5 stars to Hughes Customer Service, 5 stars to the Installer, and especially 5 stars to  the reliability and speed of the Gen 5.  

PS: I just hope they limit the number of subscribers they sign up for Gen 5,  so as not to degrade the overall speed and reliability for all users, as seemed to be the case with the Gen 4, where as I understand it,  way too many users were causing the whole Gen 4 experience to degrade.