Forum Discussion
Extremely slow Internet.
Hi, I am having a problem with extremely slow Internet, your website says that emails will be replied to within 24 hours but I have not received a single reply to any email that I have sent the compa...
Hi again,
It has been six months and I have just learned to put up with this and upgraded my service to account for constantly having to reload pages that freeze and videos that get stuck, recently my phone line has had a hum on it and people say that they are having a hard time hearing me, the grounding rod that the telephone demarcation box is attached to is very old and in a very bad place so its always been my plan to replace it...
I also have a new computer and a newer operating system but I'm still having the same problems.
When my satellite dish was installed the installer hooked up the ground wire for the incoming signal cable to an old propane line that just disappears into the foundation, this house was built in 1940 and I have no idea how old that propane line is but due to corrosion issues and the fact that it could have a plastic coupler or some kind of rubber seal in it somewhere (which would not make it a good grounding point) I've always suspected it as being a possible problem to the Internet being slow here.
So... to get to the point... to solve both problems I drove an eight foot long galvanized 5/8" thick grounding rod into the ground behind the satellite dish and ran a new ground wire for the signal cable and hooked it up to the new grounding rod, the service is working amazingly well now videos are streaming like they should and I only have to reload things every once in a while, I'm going to see how things go but I may downgrade my service back down if I end up not needing the bandwidth.
It is hard to quantify how much money and time this has cost me all over an installation error, if I really wanted to pursue this it would probably end up costing HughesNet a lot of money, but that is more time and effort than I'm willing to put into a billing issue so I'm just going to let this go as a learning experience.
My advice to everyone that is having slow Internet problems though is that if you can't get any kind of resolution within a month or two get a technician to come out and take a look at things if you don't know how to fix them yourself, don't put up with it as long as I did.
Remember, the latency is round trip. From you to the sat, then down to the gateway, and onto the net, then back to the gateway, up to the sat and back down to you. So, it's really four legs of distance travel. Roughly 89,000 miles, but a little more, being that neither you or the gateway are on the equator, directly under the satellite.
Unfortunately, problems after the gateway are out of their hands.
That is true that the distance will be further since neither I or the gateway are directly on the equator, I live somewhat north of the "45th Parallel", but still the round trip of 89,000 miles is going to be something around half a second, but going back to what I was talking about before... if I can ping my gateway at 0.4xx ms the problems should not be on my end.
Latency for satellite internet is about 500-600ms. That's for the round trip, but that's not the only thing to influence your experience. You will need to take into account the added issues caused by Internet latency and beam congestion.
Landon_Robinson wrote:
That is true that the distance will be further since neither I or the gateway are directly on the equator, I live somewhat north of the "45th Parallel", but still the round trip of 89,000 miles is going to be something around half a second, but going back to what I was talking about before... if I can ping my gateway at 0.4xx ms the problems should not be on my end.
Landon_Robinson wrote:That is true that the distance will be further since neither I or the gateway are directly on the equator, I live somewhat north of the "45th Parallel", but still the round trip of 89,000 miles is going to be something around half a second, but going back to what I was talking about before... if I can ping my gateway at 0.4xx ms the problems should not be on my end.
A ping is essentially a singular event and measures the round trip access time for that one event.
Accessing a web site or streaming server just for one access may be several events, depending upon additional content (images, stylesheets, javascript, etc.) and/or secure authentication processes, which in iteself is a multi-access event due to handshaking. So more complex than a ping, and the latency effects are cumulative.As I am writing this I am waiting on a 13.9 meg video to download and I am downloading it (via Facebook Messenger) because my connection is so slow that the video refuses to play, and it took 11 minutes to download it and another video sent by the same person earlier today was 9-ish megs and took around 5 minutes to download, with a 25 meg connection I should have been able to download both of these in under 5 seconds.
YouTube also refuses to play videos I get about a half second of content and then 10 seconds of buffering, I just had to let the video sit there until it was finally done loading which took around five minutes and then let it play, this video was only 23 seconds long and I have the video quality set as low as it will go.
Netflix has gotten better and now only takes around 30 seconds to start playing instead of waiting two minutes.
Amazon Prime Video is still telling me that I have a slow connection and asking if I want to wait longer? Then it just freezes and nothing loads, I hit Reload and it starts over doing nothing for nearly 10 seconds and then things will finally start playing around 30-45 seconds later.
Pings to my Gateway still look fine but beyond by gateway things are still bad...
traceroute to www.hughesnet.com (34.197.164.140), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 _gateway (192.168.42.1) 0.465 ms 0.446 ms 0.411 ms
2 host-67-45-0-1.hnremote.net (67.45.0.1) 612.213 ms 612.183 ms 612.220 ms
3 host-67-45-5-5.hnremote.net (67.45.5.5) 612.259 ms 612.156 ms 799.056 ms
4 host-67-45-5-4.hnremote.net (67.45.5.4) 799.089 ms 799.054 ms host-67-45-5-33.hnremote.net (67.45.5.33) 799.093 ms
5 4.16.168.17 (4.16.168.17) 799.063 ms 975.644 ms 975.621 ms
6 ae-2-3615.edge1.Dallas2.Level3.net (4.69.209.110) 1019.084 ms 703.975 ms 703.945 ms
7 99.82.183.118 (99.82.183.118) 1044.984 ms 99.82.183.120 (99.82.183.120) 969.599 ms 1498.418 ms
8 * * *
9 * * *
10 * * *
This has been going on for over a month now and I think that I have been patient enough but I need this fixed, so what do I need to do to get this fixed? If I need to get on a jet and fly to Hughesnet and personally talk to someone please let me know and I will make that happen.Is anyone going to be doing anything because I would really like this resolved, I still cannot watch videos without buffering problems and waiting forever for them to start.
Re-read the replies you got to your original post. You have higher than advertised speeds; the latency you are experiencing is normal for satellite internet; streaming will be difficult if there is congestion on the beam assigned to you; streaming is affected by congestion more than it is by speed, and your speed is more than adequate for streaming.
HN can't change the laws of physics, the current limitations of satellite technology, or force people not to clog your beam with their streaming so you can stream. You may want to look into PlayOn Cloud, which lets you download material from Netflix, Hulu, and others. Download the files when congestion is slow and then watch the downloaded files whenever you want.
Hi again,
It has been six months and I have just learned to put up with this and upgraded my service to account for constantly having to reload pages that freeze and videos that get stuck, recently my phone line has had a hum on it and people say that they are having a hard time hearing me, the grounding rod that the telephone demarcation box is attached to is very old and in a very bad place so its always been my plan to replace it...
I also have a new computer and a newer operating system but I'm still having the same problems.
When my satellite dish was installed the installer hooked up the ground wire for the incoming signal cable to an old propane line that just disappears into the foundation, this house was built in 1940 and I have no idea how old that propane line is but due to corrosion issues and the fact that it could have a plastic coupler or some kind of rubber seal in it somewhere (which would not make it a good grounding point) I've always suspected it as being a possible problem to the Internet being slow here.
So... to get to the point... to solve both problems I drove an eight foot long galvanized 5/8" thick grounding rod into the ground behind the satellite dish and ran a new ground wire for the signal cable and hooked it up to the new grounding rod, the service is working amazingly well now videos are streaming like they should and I only have to reload things every once in a while, I'm going to see how things go but I may downgrade my service back down if I end up not needing the bandwidth.
It is hard to quantify how much money and time this has cost me all over an installation error, if I really wanted to pursue this it would probably end up costing HughesNet a lot of money, but that is more time and effort than I'm willing to put into a billing issue so I'm just going to let this go as a learning experience.
My advice to everyone that is having slow Internet problems though is that if you can't get any kind of resolution within a month or two get a technician to come out and take a look at things if you don't know how to fix them yourself, don't put up with it as long as I did.
