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.
Latency of 600ms - 700ms is typical with geostationary satellite internet like HughesNet, both because of the round trip distance and infrastructure, though upwards of 1000ms or more on anything more than occasion is high.
Hopefully they'll be able to determine why it's hitting as high as it is.
I just received an email today from Hughesnet asking if the reply to my question had solved my problem?
I'm going to say with a resounding NO IT DID NOT!!! Good lord, real the previous reply and tell me if you think if solved my problem.
Speaking of, when is someone to look into this as I would really like it fixed?
What I have figured out so far is that the "Gateway" is actually at the Hughesnet ground station and since I can ping both my modem and gateway from my PC with 0.xxx ms returns that my connection to the modem, through the satellite, and all the way to the gateway are fine, the slowness problems are being caused by something beyond the gateway.
And if I had to guess I would say that Hughesnet has oversold their service and there are way too many customers going through inadequate bandwidth and it is bogging everything down, and I am not alone if you dig through all of the issues that were posted here for the last month or so you find the following...
VERY slow email access
Extremely slow internet
Slow Speed HELP
Extremely slow Internet.
...slow to no connection
Erratic speeds and poor connectivity
No Internet Connection
...Delay Problem Continues
No Internet Connection
Slow speeds with...
I have low speeds
Crippled internet...
Unable to get a reliable connection
Horribly slow speed with...
Extremely slow download speeds...
Internet and Phone Randomly Dropping Every...
Buffering issues
almost unusable internet speed...
18 other people all having issues with their Internet being way too slow, please get on this soon.
Your speeds looks to be way above the advertised 25 Mbps, so not sure what kind of "speed help" you're looking for, as your speeds are not "almost unusable internet speed." Satellite internet is sensitive to congestion, and congestion is easy to reach, especially during prime time, and also (not saying this is your case) if you have many devices connected to the wifi.
The issues you have listed seem to be just the speed issue relisted using different words. Given that your speeds are not slow for the service, and in fact are faster than advertised, there doesn't seem to be a problem other than you may be expecting cable internet when you have satellite internet.
Thank you for posting. After running diagnostics on the equipment, it appears there was inclement weather at the gateway location around the time you ran your tests. This will most definitely cause bigger spikes than normal. I know this is true due to the fact that the current speed test that I just ran showed results well above average and the latency you are receiving is within the normal range now. When checking your current gateway location, the weather is normal and the skies are clear. I also see no network or current equipment issues. In regard to the load on the system, it is no secret that congestion has always been present in some capacity. We have continuously made efforts and tangible strides towards improving this. Of course, a pandemic of this magnitude was not foreseen and the load on the system was an extreme challenge. Over the last few months alone, we have made great efforts to combat the extreme load, which is why you are able to receive the speeds you do now.
I would also have to agree with maratsade in regard to the expectations you place on satellite service. If you are accustomed to cable internet or DSL speeds higher than 25 Mbps, the speed for HughesNet will feel much slower. This is due to latency. With this satellite service, data must travel up to the satellite and back (about 45,000 miles). This does create a greater delay that is not present with common terrestrial-based providers. When it comes to the services you are used to, the signal is ground-based which makes these types of services feel faster, and in most ways they are.
With all that being said, I will continue to monitor you service over time and if these type of spikes return without reason, we will investigate the issue and resolve it. If you would like some tips to improve your streaming experience and other daily activities with the service, you have come to the right place. Please don't hesitate to ask for this, as there is a plethora of information to be gained on this community.
-Damian
Thank you for getting back to me, sorry for my frustration but it has been two months now and this still does not work as well as I would like it to, and as I mentioned before I have some online classes that I need to take and I need this to work.
I did a lot of research before I signed up for this mainly because of the two year contract as I didn't want to get stuck with something that sucked, and everything I read said that Netflix was supposed to work fine with Hughesnet so I signed up for this.
A while back I (long story short) had a 3 meg line (yes 3) with Comcast, YouTube, Netflix, etc. all worked fine and I had no issues with any of them so I know what 25 megs should be capable of, regarding my Internet loads I have one PC, one laptop (that is rarely turned on), and one cell phone (that is also rarely used), I do not have any roommates and I do not share my WiFi with any of the neighbors (who would be too far away to pick it up anyway), and the neighbor's cat that visits me occassionally does not get online.I agree that the speed tests look amazing but I don't think that they are telling the whole story, so again... the problems that I am having are that when I click on a Netflix program it will sit there for as long as five minutes before I even see one frame of video, YouTube will start a video and then 10 seconds later it buffers, then a little more video, then if buffers again and again and again, even normal websites just sit there and take forever to load even the Hughesnet.com website takes nearly 1.5 to 2 minutes before it finishes loading.
Web pages don't work right they either stall or links do not work when I click on them and I have to reload the page, and constantly having to reload pages is eating through my data allotment, even auto-correct is usually around eight words behind where I am before the red underline will show up, on DSL it was fairly instant.
And also regarding Netflix and YouTube I have the video quality turned all the way down and they still buffer.
And one final thing... a while back we had a really bad snow storm where the snow was really coming down, my dish was completely covered in a sheet of thick ice and it worked absolutely amazing like the fastest that it has ever been, I was expecting the transmit/receive lights on the modem to turn off and everything to stop working, I have no explanation for that.
So... with all of that being said what advice does anyone have to try to get this to work right?
