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Issues with Beam 82?

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ilmontgo
Sophomore

Issues with Beam 82?

I've read that there are issues with Beam 82. This is the beam I am on. Can anyone confirm or deny that?

7 REPLIES 7
Liz
Moderator
Moderator

Hi ilmontgo,

 

Welcome to the community and thank you for posting. Our engineers are working to improve service on this beam. Once we have further updates we can share, we'll post back.

 

In the meantime, I pulled up your account to investigate your concerns. After running and reviewing your site diagnostics, we have decided as a courtesy to dispatch a technician to do a complete review of your site due to the concerns you've been encountering. Your dispatch is currently scheduled for our earliest available slot: Tuesday, Oct 3, 2017 between 8:00 AM-11:00 AM. Call us at 866.347.3292 and reference case #106575179 if you need to reschedule. Please let us know how the site visit goes.

 

If you have a tech or billing question and need help, please start a new thread in the appropriate board. Unsolicited Private Messages may not get replies.

Slow performance? Click me!

Thank you Liz. That appointment works for me and I confirmed that with the service provider. I look forward to it.

Hi @Liz, thank you for scheduling a site visit. We went over the various issues and I asked the tech if he could show me the exact line of site to the satellite so I could maintain clearance of the nearby trees. He installed a new radio and we saw that the signal was in the 70's and he thought that was low for the clear weather and lack of obstruction. When I described my signal strength variation (between 50's and 90's with no apparent pattern or relation to weather), he looked closer and found that there was a slight dent in the rim of the dish. He replaced the dish and the signal strength was immediately 101 and since then has remained in the mid 90's.

 

Web response seems to be improved and my download speeds look good: http://testmy.net/quickstats/ilmontgo (note that I was in FAP mode from 9/28 to 10/1; I was running those tests to determine FAP speeds and try to observe peak hour variations). My issue hasn't been with download speeds, it has been with web response (page load times in the dozens of seconds), random periods of DNS errors and fluctuating signal. These problems would occasionally happen during the day but were excessive during evening hours.

 

I'm hopeful that my observations and speed tests this evening will be improved and I'll report back.

I'm also on Beam 82. The tech that showed up was the same installer that installed my Gen 5 system. He replaced the entire system, dish and all. The signal strength went up to 105. All is working well right now.

Hi @Liz,

 

It seems daytime performance has improved. I just had a 70 Mbps test, which is pretty amazing. Signal strength has been steady at 96. 

 

However last night during peak hours was a different story. As usual, web response became very poor and I had a few periods where pages would fail to load and would report DNS errors. Speed tests scheduled an hour apart during peak time tell the story pretty well: http://testmy.net/quickstats/ilmontgo They got as low as 2.14 Mbps (10% of the 25 Mbps) and stayed between 2-4 Mbps for the whole time that I normally experience these problems (between 7pm and Midnight). Then around midnight they shot back up to almost 30 Mbps. 

 

The tech that visited yesterday says he hears these evening usability concerns from people in this region all the time. As far as I know he is the only tech that services my area as he's been to my house 3 times over the past 1.5 years. He says he stays very busy installing and repairing for Hughesnet 6 days a week. He also says that engineering has "reversed the polarity" on the beam to try to help the problem.

 

My thought is that the people in my area are poorer than average and are mostly rural. So you have more than the average number of subscribers for a given area and many do not also have satellite television so peak-hour streaming in this area is higher than normal. I don't presume to know the engineering logistics of residential satellite internet deployment but if that's the case, maybe some of the subscribers could be split between a few overlapping beams( (maybe they already are)? Or maybe Hughesnet could think about offering a lower-cost, lower-bandwidth option to reduce the number of people using the full capacity at the same time. I know I would be much happier with a reliable 5 or 10 Mbps than what I currently have (20-40 Mbps during the day and an almost unusable 1.5-4 Mbps at night).

C0RR0SIVE
Associate Professor

Sadly, these beams dont overlap much at all, you get a few areas where two beams might overlap a mile, maybe two miles IF you're lucky...  The original plan was/is to close Echostar-17 to new subscribers and load up upgrades and new subs onto Echostar-19 till they had a balanced load and switch between birds as needed to keep load minimized...  Seems there's just too many problems cropping up that is proving problematic. 😞

@C0RR0SIVE, thank you for your candor. It seems we may be against a wall trying to improve my peak hours performance; in that everything on my end is apparently working as it should. I'll continue to monitor the speeds and state codes  over time and update here if that will help the engineers.