I ended up with both Frontier DSL and Hughes and I am going to keep it that way. My DSL is typically 11Mbps down and 1 up. My Gen4 is 20Mbps down and 2 up. However, the low latency of DSL gives a snappier performance. The DSL is not as reliable as I thought, and I get outages that last a day or two every 2 or 3 weeks. So, with one switch of an Ethernet cable, I am on the other service. Email and internet connection is important to my life style, and with the two ISPs, things have worked out well.
BTW, Verizon was the previous phone service before Frontier, and they WOULD NOT provide DSL after many, many years. So Verizon left Michigan providing landlines, and good riddance. Frontier is much better service at half the price.
I've been a customer for three months and I must say I'm very happy!That's really great to read, and I'm convinced your experience is the norm for most HughesNet users. I'm not a psychologist so I can't guess why so many more people complain than praise. Maybe something primitive in our DNA that helped us survive as a species:
"Something's Wrong! Sound the Alarm!!!"In the interests of full disclosure, I'm a HughesNet Authorized Retailer, Installer and admitted Evangelist. I currently have about 500 active HughesNet customers in our local area. They all have my phone number. And customers call if things go wrong. Yet I get very few trouble calls. Otherwise, I would probably be put out of business.
I can vouch for Netgear. I have a Netgear N300 (WNR200v4), which is an entry level model, and it has worked perfectly, save for about five or six months back when I screwed up a setting and it started causing problems. I didn't realize it was my own fault and thought that the router was going bad, but I remembered having changed some things, and sure enough, the router was absolutely fine. I've had it for about five years now. For my three devices and little house it's perfect.
I received a D-Link DIR-619L due to the (ultimately repaired) problems with the Netgear, and now feel sort of bad that I don't use it very much. LOL. The D-Link works well, too.
Those Nighthawk routers are pretty nice. A little too much for my needs, but if I had more devices I might think about something like that. Perhaps even one of those Asus routers that can use the Merlin firmware.
I actually found out that my Netgear router has a built in usage meter, and although it doesn't break it down by device usage, the total still gives a decent idea. Then again, being that I only use the router when using my laptop or notebook it sort of defeats the purpose of the meter, for my needs, anyway. LOL. Still, it's interesting that an entry level router like this even has one.
And yes, having a spare is nice, too. As we all know, electronics break down all the time, and with this router being around five years old, it's only a matter of time.