Forum Discussion
Extremely slow Internet.
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.
Sadly, the big terrestrial companies don't find the rural areas appetising. I'm glad to have satellite internet, otherwise I'd have to move. I have Verizon availability, but there aren't many towers here and so Internet access is substandard (and expensive) and the phone service unreliable.
I don't know what the signal range is, but I believe anything over 90 is excellent. Maybe someone else will have an actual range. EDIT: optimal signal strength varies by location, so for some locations 75 would be normal, and for others 100 would be normal. Your signal strength is excellent, though.
I am still having problems with things but overall things DO seem to be better...
YouTube - Most of the time it seems to work fine and the download % is staying ahead of the video %, but sometimes it just buffers around every 10 seconds or so and the video is unwatchable.
Facebook Messenger - Sometimes when I try to send someone a message it just sits there and never goes through, the little circle that is supposed to turn into a check mark just stays blank, if I try to reload the page the message that I just typed is gone.
Facebook Videos - Posted videos and/or Live streamed videos buffer unendingly and are completely unwatchable.
Twitch - Live streamed videos buffer also unendingly.
Amazon Prime Video - It takes a minute or so to load the video and sometimes I get errors to check my Internet connection or that I have a slow connection and it wants to know if I want to continue waiting? Once the video loads it buffers every couple of minutes for about ten seconds.
Netflix - Videos take about two minutes to load and then they seem to be ok, once in a while they will buffer for ten seconds or so.
And I understand what someone was saying about the signal taking a 45k mile round trip from me to the satellite to the ground station and back but... radio waves travel at the speed of light which is 186,000 miles per second, the satellite (Echostar 19) is 22,300 miles in orbit with a signal round trip of 44,600 miles which if you do the rough math the round trip is taking something of just under a quarter of a second which corrisponds with the fact that I can ping my Gateway (the Gateway is at the ground station) at 0.4xx ms.
Which brings me back to (I mentioned this in a previous comment)... the problems that I am having are at the ground station AFTER my Gateway, you fix the problems that are going on there and I will magically stop complaining.
