Sucky Service but it's all we can get in our area!

[jjbovenzi]

We recently became Hughesnet subscribers back in August after purchasing our retirement home in the country.  Hughesnet and one other company were our only choices and the other satellite company had no openings for subscribers so we really only had one choice.  Coming from having superb service with Charter for our internet and cable service and now stuck with this lame duck of a service really sucks!!!  DirecTV never told us we needed "high speed cable" to use OnDemand and other features that we're paying for but cannot access.  We have the 15gb plan and at the outrageous fees they are asking for the higher services I refuse to pay it!  We had 60mbps of download speed with Charter, now we can barely get 1mbps.  We had phone service with our package through Hughesnet but it was so horrible and ate up our bandwidth so we canceled that which was a long and frustrating phone call.  But we finally got them to drop the service with NO fees involved!  My wife needs the phone for work and since we get no Cell phone service out here it is VERY important that the house phone work and we got an AT&T hard line put in for that.  In the end... the service sucks but it's all that is available so we have to deal with it and hope that someone runs a REAL cable service into our area.  Good luck people!

[BirdDog]

If your problem is satellite internet is not like 60 Mbps cable then that really isn't a fixable problem. It is simply a fact that satellite will never be like cable and does not compete with cable.

There are things that can be done to get your speed up though if you want help with that.

[Gwalk900]

Bandwidth refers to "data throughput" not "allotment".
I agree though, the Hughes housebrand of VOIP would not have used any data from the users monthly data allowence.

Slow speeds coupled with reduced data is an indication of concurent connections by unseen/unknown devices or background processes ant needs further investigation.

[jjbovenzi]

All I can say is that by removing the phone from the modem increased the speed on our units using WiFi service.  I KNOW it made a difference getting rid of it so you can't tell it didn't.  

[jjbovenzi]

It made a big difference in our units running WiFi... without the phone we had more bandwidth and could connect 3 or 4 devices, with it connected we were lucky to get 2 working.

[jjbovenzi]

I wasn't comparing them in that mannar, I understand there is a BIG difference between the two.  What really bothers me is that I'm paying MORE now for worse internet and cable service than I was before with MUCH better service.  Between DirecTV charging us around $100 a month and Hughesnet charging around $70 we are paying more than I was for cable/internet combined with higher bandwidth and upload/download speeds and the ability to order pay per view movies.  But as my last statement stated... it's all we have available so we have to live with it.  No need to try to help... I'm more than capable of handling it, thanks.

[jjbovenzi]

The things that affect our speed cannot be controlled unfortunately... as you stated... location, weather and load on the satellite.  We're running one Desktop PC and one cell phone via WiFi so there isn't a big demand on our LAN.  Even when it's just the PC running it's a crappy connection.  And yes I do my automatic updates in the middle of the night at 3 am so it doesn't affect us during normal hours.  My original post was not meant to be a "please help me".  It was merely
 a statement that I wish we had cable service out here, we got spoiled all those years with true "HighSpeed" service and not this crappy Gen4 "highspeed" that Hughesnet advertises.  Rant over, thanks for reading.

[BirdDog]

Well, this is what I'm getting right now with my wife streaming YouTube (low definition) on her tablet the same time I did the test. It serves our purposes fine but maybe I'd feel different coming from cable. All we've ever had is dial-up then satellite.

[donagibbons]

You must not be an engineer or never been in a military.  Why are there satellites doing terabyte data streaming and data mining 24/7?  Why do you have cable television relays getting their shows by satellite instead cable lines?

[C0RR0SIVE]

There are no satellites that are pumping out terabytes worth of data, it's currently not possible as far as a two-way communications satellite goes.