okay a phone line tech got my speed up to 7Mbps, which is usable though slow.
Thank you for reaching out to us. First we need to figure out why you are not receiving an adequate amount of speed to your devices. Then I can give some tips on how to manage data based on what I see and how you are using the service. Please private message me the phone number associated with your account and I will begin looking into this. Please click the link below to send me a message
https://community.hughesnet.com/t5/notes/composepage/note-to-user-id/76644 .
Your answer that this is congestion from summer traffic makes no sense. One it postulates that suddenly thousands of users suddenly jumped on the network last week as that is when my speed crashed from a usable 4 to 10 mbps to under .5 mbps. It didn't crash at the end of May or the first week of June when school let out. Two, since at least 9am my speed had been at a steady .275 mbps and it is now 3 am and that is still the speed. I refuse to believe that the same number of people are up in the middle of the night using the internet as use it during the day. Three, if Hughesnet has oversold its bandwidth to the point of being one third as slow as dial up, how are your engineers going to fix the situation? Launching more satellites this week? Or sending around teams of assassins to take out current uses and thus reduce the congestion? Also why is the company still advertising for more people to join up, knowing that they cannot provide service? Did one of your satellites shut down? I find the nebulous no time from for this issue to be resolved, unacceptable. Why should your customers continue to pay for a service they are not getting?
Glad you got some speed back, but just want to point out a few things:
1. Not every school in the country got out the same time as your local schools. The beam you're on covers a wide swath of your local area, but the gateway on the other side of the satellite includes 15 or such beams from various parts of the country. Congestion can occur at any part of the system and therefore from any part of the country. Many schools got out mid-June.
2. I also doubt the same amount of people are using the network at 3am, however, many people can automatically schedule the bulk of their upgrade downloads (and Netflix downloads) at that time. Also consider that if you're on the East Coast that's midnight on the West Coast. And if you think kids with no school the next day aren't up late secretly binging all the Marvel and Star Wars stuff off of Disney+ at that hour... but hey, in my day it was comic books and a flashlight. 👀
3. Also consider that streaming is a very server-intensive activity that will load down a satellite system with an inherent 5-600mS latency in a heartbeat. If you like, I can point you to the details of how that happens and may sporadically happen throughout the day. However, you need to know is that streaming is greatly impacted by latency, not speed, and that latency is impacted by users loading down the system.
Not that it really matters in the end, as it's still too darn slow, but just for reference, 0.275Mbps, or 275Kbps, is roughly seven times the average speed of dialup of 0.040Mbps, or 40Kbps.
