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Newly Upgraded to Gen5 - Speeds Substantially SLOWER than Gen4

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Freshman

Newly Upgraded to Gen5 - Speeds Substantially SLOWER than Gen4

We recently upgraded our service from Hughes Gen4 (Dishnet) to Gen5. The service was initially impressive, especially compared with what we were used to Gen4. For the first week or so the speeds were great. I ran a few tests as we were usually at about 20mb/s. Video on Amazon Prime streamed in HD with no buffering. We were happy.

 

After about a week the speeds seemed to suffer. I've been on Gen4 so long I've gotten out of the habit of streaming (used to have FiOS at another house). I tried to watch a few shows on Amazon and kept getting errors from Amazon saying my connection was too slow to stream, even with my video option set to "data saver", Amazon's lowest stream rate. I initially assumed that I was just in the evening rush, which we'd gotten used to on our old service. 

 

Then our service got REALLY slow. I ran a few speed tests on the my.Hughesnet.com support panel and was shocked to see I was getting download rates of less than 1mbps. I recycled power on my modem and that seemed to fix things. My first test was around 18mbps. That didn't last. Here's a sampling of consecutive speed tests I had a couple of nights ago:

1: 1.53 mbps

2: 0.58 mbps

3: 1.69 mbps

4: 1.21 mbps

5: 1.91 mbps

6: 1.37 mbps

7: 0.27 mbps

8: 0.18 mbps

9: 2.09 mbps

10: 0.74 mbps

 

I've called the Hughes support line twice and spend well over three hours in total talking with tech support. I'd already done practically everything they asked of me including: turning off all other wi-fi devices, running tests connected with a LAN cable, not wi-fi, running tests in safe-mode, restarting modem, etc. One huge frustration I've had with Hughes support has been the amnesiac quality of the tech support. I was careful to get a case id from each tech support agent to ensure we wouldn't have to start all over at zero with each call. Each agent assured me they were taking detailed notes and would ensure those were available for future calls. They didn't.

 

On the second, 1.5 hour call, I had to go back and literally do every single step in the troubleshooting process I'd already done the day before. I'm not proud, but I lost my temper and was rude to the agent. She offered to have a technician come out a couple of days later (today)...if I paid $125. I refused, and she said she could cut the price in half. I refused again and said I'd cancel the service before I paid. She agreed to send the technician for free. 

 

The technician came today and tooked our system over. He couldn't find anything wrong. He agreed to swap our modem for another. I'd hoped there was some kind of firmware problem with the modem. Our first few tests seem to confirm this diagnosis. The first few tests on the new modem were great - upper 20's mbps. The tech left, I started watching some shows on Amazon. My speeds have cratered again. These are my last four results from testmy.net:

speed test results - 8-25-17.jpg

 

I'm at nearly a complete loss for what is going on. Has anyone else experienced this kind of degraded service? It almost seems as if someone at Hughes has selected our account for especially slow speeds. 

 

One notable thing - our upload speeds are all great, typically between 2.5 and 4 mbps. How can that be when my down speeds are as bad as they are? 

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