I'm a new Hughesnet gen 5 customer and have some questions on how to get the best performance from the service. I was a communication engineer years ago and have some knowledge about the TCP congestion control problems using geo satellites and am somewhat suprised to see a great deal of difference between different internet sites. My gamining computer died the other day and I'm having to rebuild it so lots of downloading involved. First of all using a speed test program the link is generally 20-26 Mbps but the performance on downloads from real world sites has tremendous variation. The Steam site is managing 8 to 16 Mbps which is good but at the same time a Microsoft download for Directx is around .2 to 2 Mbps. Is there anything that I can do to speedup the Microsoft downloads? I have searched this site for a couple of days and have found a LOT of folks with the same problem but have yet to find a solution posted.
I'm not personally familiar with any settings adjustments that could/would help, but it does seem that at least some people experience slow downloads from Microsoft. I used to when I had Gen4, but not with Gen5. I suspect, though I have no way to prove or disprove, that Microsoft's servers are sensitive to the higher latency inherent to satellite internet and it causes problems. I could be wrong, and probably am, as if that were the reason it should be the same for everyone, but this is the only thing I could ever come up with.
On one occasion it took me over 24 hours to download about 700MB of Windows updates. From most other sites a file size of 700MB would have taken under four minutes at the speed I was getting at the time.
Apple downloads sometimes give people similar issues.