Slow or dropping connection

No worries! Thank you!

Well, again, thank you for your help. It's working at this point, but sometimes still very slow loading elements. This isn't just the latency overhead, since we're accustomed to that.

What can we do on our end, other than power cycling the modem and of course keeping snow off the dish? Are any of the steps you took repeatable by the end user?

I do like the service when it's working properly. The latency isn't a big hassle, and the speeds are good. I'd just like the experience to be consistent.

The packet loss could also be the segment the signal traverses from the satellite down to the ground station.
What is the number to the right of Data IPGW when you go to this page? Should be something like "J2xxxyyyHNSIGWzzzz". Mainly interested in the xxxyyy part.

I called the support number on Thursday, and they gave me case ID 116869955. The last thing the first level tech did was to get the advanced tech to change my gateway. It's now J2OMA013HNSIGW0101, to answer your question. They said that this should hopefully fix the problem within 24 hours; That does appear to be the case. It was a little bit discouraging at first, though, because we still saw tons of packet loss and very slow speeds yesterday morning, but by yesterday evening, the connection was quite solid.

All of this testing and troubleshooting burned through the last of our data for the month, unfortunately, but even in the degraded state during normal hours, we're seeing much faster speeds now.

Thanks to everyone who has read and replied on this thread!

Well, not sure what it used to be, but your gateway is in Omaha, Nebraska now. You may want to check the weather there when you have a connection problem, just to be sure.

That said, that's just the first thing to check if something's intermittent. The other things that can affect it are:
1. Dish alignment - in case it's been hit hard by something like a lawn mower or falling tree limb, or if the mount has otherwise been somehow dislodged.

2. Blockage and/or reflections - Blowing tree limbs and foliage can cause havoc if anywhere within 45 degrees of the dish's view. The signal can be reflected back into the dish causing nasty standing wave patterns, increasing the overall error rate (and reducing the signal quality number you see).

3. Unsecure cable connections/leaky cables - Cables should be finger tight at the back of the modem as well as at the dish. The cabling itself should be water-resistant, so the outer covering should be clear of any nicks or breaks. Might want to inspect all connections and cabling to make sure there are no problems.
4. Power supply - The modem should be plugged directly into the wall and not go through a filtered power strip or other uninteruptable power source. Power variations and low voltage situations can disrupt the way the modem regulates power to the transmitter through the cabling to the dish.

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MarkJFine wrote:

Well, not sure what it used to be, but your gateway is in Omaha, Nebraska now.  

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If they actually did change his gateway, it must mean he's in one of those fringe areas with overlapping beams in which they could remotely swap his service to the alternate beam.  If that's the case, I wonder if being in that fringe area could have made his service more susceptible to signal issues with the previously used beam.  

Good morning MrCRJP,

Thank you for all your updates, glad to hear the service is working better now. I've escalated your case to our engineers here at corporate to ensure the same concerns don't pop up again later. I've also sent you some free tokens for the troubleshooting efforts, so you may receive an e-mailed order confirmation for the complimentary tokens.

If you do encounter anything out of the ordinary, please note the state code you see at the time so it can help us focus our efforts.

Thank you for the tokens and the resolution here. I'll be sure to post again if anything changes. I think GabeU might be on to something about our location being on the transition point between two beams. Thankfully, the new gateway seems to be doing what we need.

In response to MarkJFine, the power supply is something I don't quite understand about satellite modems. When we first had our install done, the installer was hesitant to connect the power supply to our UPS. I didn't understand this; Shouldn't a UPS or filtered power strip provide stability against the power variations which would otherwise cause problems? Plus, our UPS produces a true sine wave when it switches to battery.. If it was the more blocky DC/AC conversion of a conventional UPS, I could understand the problem. Either way, we operated just fine on the UPS for 14+ months until this problem cropped up.. Ironically, when I pulled the power supply from the UPS and connected it directly to the wall outlet!

We also have some tree limbs which might now be starting to cause a problem, although there are no leaves on the limbs any more, of course. I may look into doing some additional trimming in the spring just to eliminate this. We took down about 10 trees this last spring to clear the skies for our Dish service!

Again, thank you to everyone who has replied. I'm going a bit verbose here in case any other customers stumble across this thread, so that maybe they can glean a solution from it. :)

Hi MrCRJP,

I just got a call from an engineer who looked into your site and we'd like to monitor your modem through tomorrow to make sure nothing is functioning out of the ordinary. Please don't reboot the HughesNet modem until I get the OK from the engineer. 

Please also monitor your internet performance for anything notable. 

  Your cooperation, patience, and understanding are much appreciated.

Good morning MrCRJP,

Thanks for letting me know you rebooted the modem. First thing this morning the engineer asked me about that, haha. He'd like to monitor your terminal for the next 24-48 hours for a good sample. Please don't reboot and take note of service degradation if you observe any.

I'll post back once I have news to share from engineering, I appreciate your help.

Ok, thank you. This morning, I was able to browse text websites a bit, but was unable to even load a speed test site, or download a podcast. I saw 30-40% packet loss when I ran the connectivity test. I'm at work now, and my wife is being forced to use her phone's data connection, since our Hughesnet connection is currently unusably slow. I do hope we're able to work out the root problem here, because this experience is quite frustrating. Thank you for your help!

You're very welcome. I've also sent over this feedback to engineering. We'll keep you posted!

Woo, engineer called me about your feedback just now. Currently we're seeing 34 Mbps in download speeds from the HughesNet modem, and all other diagnostics look good. I understand you're not at home to troubleshoot, but if it's possible to get this info, it would be helpful to the engineer.

How was your wife trying to use the internet when she found it unusably slow?

Via wifi device?

Via computer connected directly to modem? 

Is she able to run a few speed tests on testmy.net right now while we're seeing good diagnostic results?

She was just reading forums on some web sites via WiFi using Chrome on her phone. Everything would either not load at all, or load after a long delay with broken elements on the page. She's not very tech savvy at all, and is being kept very busy today by our baby, so I may not be able to get any results until I get home.

Did anything change with our configuration, or does it just happen to look good right now?

Unfortunately, we're not able to get numbers until I get home from work, because something didn't work on the speed test site for her. Even more unfortunately, we're almost certainly going to go over on our phone data plan this month as a result of all this.

Hopefully something has changed, and we'll now see better speeds most of the time on the Hughesnet service. I'll post an update about how it's looking when I get home.

That's understandable, whenever you can get testmy.net results will do. Nothing to my knowledge has been changed. Even right now, the download speed from the modem is now at 37 Mbps down.

We are curious to know what speeds you're seeing while directly connected to the modem. Looking forward to hearing back.

Sounds good! I'll send this over to the engineer. He hasn't mentioned anything since I had you monitor your system for improvements, so I can't say if there was any adjustment done. I'll let you know if I have any further instruction from the engineer. This sounds promising.

Good morning MrCRJP,

Just checking in on you, is the HughesNet system still working well for you?