HughesNet Gen5
Hughes Successfully Launches High-throughput Satellite
Setting the stage for the next generation of HughesNet Gen5 satellite Internet service
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Forum Discussion
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.
I have no doubt that there will eventually be enough people on the Echostar 19 satellite that it will cause a certain level of congestion and speed dips during peak usage periods, but I'm sure it will be a considerable time before that happens, and when it does, I also have a feeling that it won't be quite as impactful as it was getting on the Echostar 17 with Gen4. The ES19 has over double the capacity of the ES17, too, so that will surely help.
Gen5 is most definitely a step up, that's for sure.
And that Verizon network extender you mentioned...pretty nifty.
GabeU wrote:I have no doubt that there will eventually be enough people on the Echostar 19 satellite that it will cause a certain level of congestion and speed dips during peak usage periods, but I'm sure it will be a considerable time before that happens, and when it does, I also have a feeling that it won't be quite as impactful as it was getting on the Echostar 17 with Gen4. The ES19 has over double the capacity of the ES17, too, so that will surely help.
Gen5 is most definitely a step up, that's for sure.
And that Verizon network extender you mentioned...pretty nifty.
One full month connected to Gen 5! I am overall very pleased although I am using my higher speed data allowance at about 10 times the rate I was before, even though we are NOT downloading videos etc. In spite of that, the performance even after all daytime and nightime high speed data was used up by about day 18 of my month, remained satisfactory with 3mbs download speeds and close to that in upload speeds. I am also pleased with the coverage of the built in Wifi in the HN Gen 5 modem, as signal reaches to the other end of our home, unlike the Netgear wifi that I was using with the Gen 4 modem.
I did call customer service on my data usage and the very helpful support person was able to tell me all the specific devices that were connected to my HN wifi modem and was able to list them by each of the 3 iPhones, the dell PC, the android device, the Verizon extender, etc. He further was able to tell me that one of the iPhones had used over 1GB of data in the last few hours--nothing like having kids home for the Independence Day holiday!. He also told me that the Verizon (made by Samsung) Range Extender had used about 10GB of data since the modem was last powered on. (which I think was one month ago when the Gen 5 modem was installed--but maybe we had a blip of a power outage about 3 weeks ago during a storm--at least enough for a couple of my clocks to be flashing 12:00-but don't know if that was enough to repower the HN modem or not. In spite of this high data usage by the Verizon Range Extender, it is remaining connected, as it allows us to use our cell phones near and within our home, rather than having to drive 7 miles to get cell signal. Even the throttled back Gen 5 data speeds at the end of the month were still good enough to permit the Verizon Range Extender to work reasonably well--a little bit more garbling compared to earlier in the month--but it so much better than the Gen 4 era, when even when we had our full data allowance the Range Extender was basically useless.
It appears that Hughes is still adding features to their wifi modem--I told the customer service person that the ability for me to check on which device was using a disproportionate amount of data would be very useful (so I know which kid to blame-I am not serious--we don't see them enough as they both live a long ways from here and we wish they could come home more often). If they can then further make information on apps or web sites, by connected device, that are the largest data burners I think it would keep a lot of customers from ''blaming'' Hughes rather than understanding that certain social media web sites really use up a lot of data.
So I hope HN adds such data monitoring and analysis capabilities for subscribers that log in to to their accounts sooner rather than later. I think it would really cut back on customer service calls relating to data usage.
I did end up disconnecting my Directv from the HN wifi, as that seems to use a lot of data even when no 'on demand' movies were watched during the month. It appears that all of the Guides and Program Search features of Directv which normally download (slowly) from the directv sattelite, switch over to using the Wifi network for all the updates, when a wifi connection is present. I keep my PC network setting set to the Metered position, I have my android set to 'do not auto play video content' such as from news websites, but the Directv box cannot be controlled that way. So I simply reset the Directv Menu Settings to disconnect from the wifi.
