S/N B30010585352AA
Consistently slow speeds of under 1.5Mbps or 1500Kbps. This is my story.
I live in Central WV and ordered Hughesnet because they wanted to work with Frontier DSL customers that were unhappy with the speeds on the local DSL system. I called to inquire into a suitable plan for people, like me, who wanted to get rid of Frontier and have a real broadband source. They told me I could have the 5M @ 10 and 10Gb plan for 39 a month for 3 months then 49 a month for the remaining 21 month commitment. Sounds great! I said let's do it. The next day a very nice young man showed up and installed my system in 3 inches of snow with temps in the low 20s. It worked great right out of the box. I was actually getting speeds in excess of 20Mb most of the time and never lower than 10Mb. I originally signed up for a trial of the phone thing too, but that did not work well for us. The latency was horrible and we were missing calls because of some unknown reason. I cancelled it but kept the sat system. 3 weeks in, around Thanksgiving the speed bottomed out. Suddenly instead of 10Mb plus I wasn't even getting 1Mb. Pages would not load, uploads would take forever and as it goes I called them. They said they would "for free" upgrade me to the 10Mb 10 and 20Gb plan. It did not fix the speeds as they thought it would. Called back a time or two more and jumped through their hoops of problem solving for over 4 hours and still nothing working right. They finally agreed to send a tech out who could not find a problem and so they escalated me to the next level of advanced tech support. They upgraded me again to the 10Mb 15 and 50Gb plan... And so it goes that the same tech was sent back out again at no charge because the system was continuing to not function correctly. Meanwhile several of my customers are reporting the same speed issues to me and to Hughesnet. They are neighbors and nearby so I am assuming that it is a beam congestion issue. Anyway, the tech replaced the radio, verified the cabling was good and made sure it was not my computer or network causing the issue. The speed did increase to about 6Mb for a day or so but then soon it was right back to the same speeds as it has been since Thanksgiving. At this point I am disillusioned and dismayed at this ordeal...after reading several community posts about the same exact issues I have no choice but to accept they have done the same thing that Frontier Communications did to the local DSL and that is over sell their bandwidth. I have processed my cancellation today because I do not have the time to continue this ordeal and will be ending my service on the last day of this month. They were even nice enough to waive the early termination and are sending me a equipment kit to send them the stuff back.
Conclusions. I sincerely regret that we cannot do business, your customer support, your technicians and your management team has been nothing short of phenomenal. I appreciate your professionalism and your cordiality. I am sorry things did not work out.
If you or anyone reading this has any insight into my story, or a solution or can fix it I would consider reactivating and keeping Hughesnet services.
Sincerely,
Will D.
Central WVa.