Low speed - Gen 5 doesn't seem to be any better than a 2400 baud modem. Am I doing something wrong?

[norlando319]

I live in a large metropolitan area, but every once in a while ( a few times per month) we go visit my wife's dad in the mountains.  He's on a ranch - solar electricity, well water, cell service - there are no ground lines anywhere.

I have been looking for reliable internet service for YEARS, and had Starband before they went out of buiness.  They had consistently moderate speeds and ridiculous prices, so we turned them off after our contact was done, and went with wi-fi hotspots for a while.  Then my son and his family of five moved to the place to help out my aging father-in-law.  The kids are in school, so we need internet.  I work remotely from the place too, so we need speed and reliability.  I bought Gen 5.  For the first year, I had it at 30Gb, and it seemed adequate, until the kids moved up.  They imediately started complaining about low speed, unreliable service, dropped connections, etc.

At the one year mark, I INCREASED my data plan to 50Gb (figuring they were blowing through 30Gb by mid-month, and were being throttled).  now I up here, trying to get some work done.  I am 19 days into my billing cycle, and according to the usage stats, I should still have 11G left of my regular allotment, and some ridiculous amount of "bonus" (the 2am) data. Using Hughes' speedtst, I get a decent (though not remarkable - Gen 5...) 27Mb/s down and 2.7Mb/s up.

I'm using WinSCP to transfer several SMALL files to a remote site, and WinSCP transfer speed shows 500BPS (not Kb, not Mb - BYTES).  What??  I'm transferring about 15 Meg worht of data, and it's taking me 90+ minutes??  There is NO WAY that's 2.7Mb/s upload.  Speedtest appears flawed fromt he Hughesnet page.  In addition, Ookla Speedtest.net (my go-to, most of the time) WON'T EVEN CONNECT, due to horrible network latency issues.

This is untenable, right now.  Are there really tips and tricks to making things work better, or have I been paying for a pipe dream?  For what I'm paying every month for this "service", I could buy plenty of boards to bang my head against for less frustration and pain... 

[GabeU]

@norlando319

Because most speed tests don't give proper results for satellite internet, mostly due to the latency, HughesNet's recommended speed testing site is testmy.net.  When testing, make sure to use the manual 25MB test size for download tests and the manual 4MB test size for upload tests. 

If you plan to use the speed tests for troubleshooting purposes with HughesNet, which they will require for addressing speed issues, please make sure to run the tests at testmy.net under an account you have created, using a single device that is connected to the modem with a LAN cable, and with the WiFi in the HT2000W disabled.  All of this is laid out in the speed testing instructions for troubleshooting speed issues, but I didn't post them in the normal fashion as, at least at this point, there doesn't appear to be a speed issue with the service, overall.  If you do see an overall speed issue, though, please do say so.  

https://testmy.net/

As for the problem with transferring your files, I'm not at all familiar with WinSCP, nor really any file transfer service, but there are people here who are and will hopefully reply and help you.  I'll tag a few people who may be able to help with this.

@MarkJFine

@C0RR0SIVE

@BirdDog

[Zane]

Same answer from all these people about HughesNet only accepting speed test from one place and doing the speed test only from your computer with a direct connection. None of these answers help when it is your cell phone service that sucks I need to be able to make phone calls and HughesNet is a fast enough to do it even with its 5 gigabyte whatever service and from the same phone I getting 1.18 megabytes per second upload speed just like everybody else seems to be getting around here so maybe HughesNet needs to fix it system or tell us how to actually get better upload speed so we can use the devices we pay for. I specifically bought HughesNet and a cell phone capable of Internet phone calls and upgraded the service for faster speed but it does me no good when I can hear them perfectly fine but all I hear is I can't hear you I can't hear you I can't hear you and they hang up especially when I'm trying to talk to the nurses for my mother who's on a ventilator in a hospital. How do I increase the upload speed to something usable at least on a bright and Shining sunny in Florida today?

[BirdDog]

@Zane, cell phone calling over WiFi will not work well on satellite due to the high latency, regardless the upload speed.

[GabeU]

@Zane

In addition to what BirdDog said about WiFi calling and satellite internet, WiFi calling is not supported, either officially or technically, by HughesNet.  

If you need home phone service, HughesNet does offer their own Voice service.  For info on HughesNet Voice service, please call 866-347-3292, or see the following...

https://www.hughesnet.com/get-started/hughesnet-voice

[MarkJFine]

Would help to know what protocol you're using in WinSCP.

You should have no issue with straight FTP or even SFTP. I regularly get 3-4Mbps upload speeds for a weekly 50MB podcast I post-produce, to a server in Germany using SFTP.

Can't speak for any of the other modes like WebDAV (which is really ping-heavy and therefore would be exceptionally slow on satellite), SCP, or S3. In fact I'm not all that familiar with the latter two.

[Liz]

Gonna close this inactive thread, thanks for your input everyone!