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Beam 54 SLOW SLOW SLOW

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ChaCha
Sophomore

Beam 54 SLOW SLOW SLOW

I have been a customer of Hughes for many years.  Though at times the performance has degraded or issues have arisen, never I have I experienced such dreadful performance speeds as I am now.  I actually telecommuted from home for several years which required me to participate in teleconference calls and lead training sessions in live internet hosted meetings.  During that time I had remarkably few issues and when I did they were resolved quickly through Hughes Tech Support.  No it was not high speed cable heaven, but it worked for me.  And I promoted Hughesnet among friends and neighbors and fellow workers. Thank you, Hughes for those years.

But my attitude is changing.  I can only hope that those I have referred to Hughes are not experiencing the same torture that I am.  The performance speeds in the past few months have been unacceptable.  I have had such slow access that it is almost too painful to check mail and impossible to do so without having to click/send receive 5 or more times due to interrupts. Forget about streaming a video on youtube, it takes over 5 minutes to buffer a 50 second video.  A friend sent me 21 MB of Xmas photos that took 45 minutes to download.

I checked with support on Dec 12 and was told that the issue was a known Gen 5 issue, caused by the large number of users had not been anticipated and that engineers were trying to provide an fix to handle the increased load. I was also told the issue would be resolved in a few weeks.  

I ran Hughes speed test on Dec 24th to get Download of 0.19 Mbps and Upload of 1.37 Mbps.  

I ran Hughes speed test today to get Download of 1.33 Mbps and Upload of 0.72 Mbps.  

Testmy.net yeilds Download result of 0.46 Mbps.  I will keep trying over the next few days to see if there is improvement.   

 

I was much happier on Gen 4, but in August started to run into internet slowdowns.  Support recommended that I upgrade to Gen5.  What a mistake that has been. At first all seemed rosy with good speeds.  Before long those good speeds were erratic.   Sometimes they were good and within a few minutes practically grind to a halt.  I am quite sure that all the attempts I make when trying to access mail or stream videos that fail with multiple interrupts are eating up my download data allowances. It is rare that I surf the internet more than 2 hours in a day; usually less than 30 minutes and I do not even check email daily.  (and that would be much less if I had faster access though I have spent even more time trying to track down what this issue is and when it will be fixed.)  I was working 60 plus hour weeks on the same data package.  Something is really wrong here.  It is a waste of time to buy data tokens.   And Hughes offer of deducting half of my bill, though generous, does not relieve my frustrations.

More important I think is the Hughes reactive instead of proactive response.  After I phoned in my issue, and struggled with the tech support assistance for more than an hour, an engineer was finally brought on line to explain the problem.  Why aren't known problems like this communicated to support?  This was a waste of my time and support time.  Seeing that there are too many clients posting performance issues here and on consumer affairs and consumer complaint sites, leads me to assume that Hughes currently has a significant underlying problem that they are not being upfront about to their clients.   A simple notice sent to clients and posted on Community along with timely updates would have eased the frustrations experienced by clients and would help to restore faith in the product.   

7 REPLIES 7
BirdDog
Assistant Professor

Would help to post a Testmy.net results link as described below. This is mine:  https://testmy.net/quickstats/BirdDog2017

 

To help the Hughesnet Customer Service Reps get a head start on your speed concerns, you should create a testmy.net account and perform 3-5 tests during different parts of the day. Then share the account results link with us here.

Please keep in mind that Hughesnet will only accept testmy.net and the official Hughesnet speed test results. Tests from other sites like speedtest.net are not accepted due to the compression technologies and latency that satellite deploys.

Most important points to remember during this test:
-do the tests while directly connected to the HughesNet modem with a LAN cable (NO third party Router or Wireless devices can be used)
-use the 12MB size download test file ONLY if on Gen4 Service Plan
-use the 25MB size download test file ONLY if on Gen5 Service Plan

-If testing upload instead of download, you must use a 4MB size upload test file
-space each test at least 5 minutes apart
-post your results URL here, it may look something like http://testmy.net/quickstats/C0RR0SIVE


For a more in depth guide on running the tests, please visit: http://customer.kb.hughesnet.com/Pages/7001.aspx

The Reps are on M-F from approximately 8AM to 5PM Eastern. They will be the ones to address your speed issues, but they will need these tests to do so.

What would be the purpose of running all these additional tests when Hughes engineers have already seen my test results and told me there was a known problem that is affecting many and that they are already working on? None has yet told me that the problem is fixed.

Ran hughes speed test at 7 am with result of 21.84 Mbps and thought I had died and gone to heaven. Twenty minutes later, the slow down began and my screens froze.  Stepped away for 10 minutes and then ran speed test again at 7:30 am.  This time it was 0.39 Mbps.  Sigh.   

I had an email today from Support asking if my question for this issue had been answered and to mark one as a solution.  No it has not been answered.  

Though I appreciate the input from the community, here are my questions for tech support please:

  1. When will the performance issues be fixed?
  2. When a beam is known to have performance issues is everyone on that beam affected or just some users?
  3. Why doesn't first line of support or even second line of support know about the performance issues on some (or all?) of the beams?     Yesterday on a call, after being passed to 3 different support techs, I was told that only Tier 3 had that information.  This meant I had to review concern with each.
  4. Is it possible that the slow speeds cause download interrupts requiring download restarts and won't this eat up data limits?  Noone could answer with any certainty on the call yesterday.  

 

I realize you're addressing this for tech support to answer, but if I can interject:
1. Fixing it is a complex process that involves looking at all possible causes/avenues and what's been prioritized. Not every thing is the same issue. They won't provide a timeline.
2. When a beam has been stated to have 'performance issues' it really means that the majority of those on that beam appear to be affected. The cause may in fact be symptomatic of how the majority of the customers on that beam are using it, and when they are using it. It's doubtful that the actual spot beam on the satellite is having problems. If it did, you'd probably see a widespread outage.
3. Not trying to be funny, but, I think you might over estimate the capability of first-line triage support. Do you know what phone support/help desk personnel get paid? You're not getting degreed engineers that understand the technology. They basically get a script and a flow chart to do low-level diagnosis and figure the next course of action, and are rarely provided updated system status - and that's true for most businesses.

4. Depending upon the reason for the slow speed, yes, it could cause excessive data usage. This is especially true if you have marginal wifi signal. In those cases a garbled wifi packet may require a packet resends. This results in a lower average speed (per acknowledged packet) and also increases your data usage (redundant packets). In exreme cases it can also cause a download to completely timeout and fail if there are too many nacks.

 

Edit: Re #4. Can also apply to problems in the signal between satellite and dish transceiver.


* Disclaimer: I am a HughesNet customer and not a HughesNet employee. All of my comments are my own and do not necessarily represent HughesNet in any way.

Thank you, Mark.   I knew that one or more of the gang would not be able to resist answering.  🙂

I appreciate your answers and place value to them.

 

However, I really am looking for something concrete from Tech Support.  My experience has shown that they tend to delay answers (answering that the problem will be 'fixed in a few weeks' and it has already been months) or not answer directly ( 'I will take that to engineering').  Is the fix in QA or still in development?  Sometimes I feel like they are not really even acknowledging the issue and how widespread it is.

 

I do not feel that I overestimate what the capabilities of support should be.  I worked more than 20 years in the software vendor industry including roles in Support, QA, Development, and Design. For each of companies I worked with, we all worked closely together.  There were weekly meetings with Support and Support was handed a known issues list for each release or patch. This was in addition to the list they maintained themselves based on what clients were reporting.  In fact Support was the only owner of the client issues list. Support was well organized and no matter what QA or Development told them, nothing came off that list without Support reviewing and closing the issue.  We had many support personnel that held degrees.  Granted, I worked with medical software and there was no way our clients would have accepted such treatment so we had to have support that had the knowledge to accurately answer clients and trained to responds quickly and respond with respect. There was never any talking down to clients nor allowing clients to disrespect each other.  However, when one of our clients walked away, it meant millions of dollars off the table.  For us, Hughesnet subscribers, to get that kind of response I feel would mean that we would all have to support each others efforts to get results.

 

If support has a flowchart, and performance has been a main concern, then that should be on the flowchart.  The first thing they should do is check the beam the client is on and compare it to a known list of beams that are having issues.  Then they should inform the caller that this is possibly the result of a known issue.  If needed they can continue to trouble shoot to elimine any other possible issues.   However, it if really is a beam issue, then do not bother the caller with all those other  packaged responses and redundant tasks.  They are demeaning.

 

Understand. Yes, it can be frustrating, but it's also why I always came here first (or the predecessor of 'here') for technical issues.

Part of the issue with that is, as you can see, only two reps when there used to be quite a few. Pretty sure they have other jobs on top of this place too, so although they're extremely valuable, they're also stretched pretty thin.

From what I've gathered, the engineering staff is also stretched pretty thin. They're looking at not only this but several other hot issues as well.

They may very well have internal timelines that they are managing to, but I'd be very reticent to discuss them publicly in here in order to properly manage expectations. Imagine if they said it would be fixed tomorrow, and for some reason tomorrow came and went... this place would erupt.

I can also go on how you can't really compare running a software business (low investment, low overhead) to something as hardware intensive as satellite internet (very high investment, high overhead) and how that relates to cost savings, margins and reinvestment strategy, but that's a bit beyond scope.


* Disclaimer: I am a HughesNet customer and not a HughesNet employee. All of my comments are my own and do not necessarily represent HughesNet in any way.