Hughesnet Community

speeds less than 1mbps since sign up

cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
phalen
Freshman

speeds less than 1mbps since sign up

Got hughesnet 11/30/17.

 

Satellite Name    EchoStar-19-NAD
Gateway ID    9
Beam ID    39
Outroute ID    6

 T'was more or less pushed on me by dishnet as an upgrade. Prior to the switch I was averaging 7mbps.

 

With new Hughesnet systemn modem tests, system tests all fine but

speeds have consistenly been running below 1mbps.

First call in confirmed that info.
I ran the hughesnet speed test (at my.hughesnet.com.)  The results were:
                       .34 mbps download, .23 mbps upload
which is actually better than the speeds I'm generally getting.
Began using a packet sniffer and the speeds average around 500 to 100 or less kbps.
Yes, that is kbps.
I've tried more than one and the results are consistent.

I have called in 3 times.  There has been a 1/2 hr plus wait all month.
Noone could offer an explanation. The closest guess was a problem with the gateway.
I was promised a callback from a level 4 technician which has never come.  First was told 2 days, then 5 days, then a month or more.

This is a joke.

My hookup to the modem is ethernet.

 

I would like an explanation and a time for resolution.

24 REPLIES 24
maratsade
Distinguished Professor IV

Phalen,

 

The Hughesnet employees will likely ask you to perform speed tests.  These are the instructions they give,and that you should follow:

 

To help the HughesNet Customer Service Reps get a head start on your speed concerns you should create a testmy.net account and, while signed into that account, perform a batch of 3-5 tests during different parts of the day, then share the account results link with us here.

Please keep in mind that HughesNet will only accept testmy.net and the official HughesNet speed test results. Tests from other sites like speedtest.net are not accepted due to the compression technologies and latency that satellite deploys.

Most important points to remember during this test:
-do the tests while directly connected to the HughesNet modem with a LAN cable (NO third party Router or Wireless devices can be used)
-disable the WiFi while the speed tests are being performed
-use the 25MB size download test file ONLY
-If testing upload instead of download, you must use a 4MB size upload test file
-space each test at least 5 minutes apart
-post your testmy results URL here, it may look something like http://testmy.net/quickstats/yourusername

For a more in depth guide on running the tests, please visit: http://customer.kb.hughesnet.com/Pages/7001.aspx

 

 

This repeated and redundant demand for rigorous testmy.net results from each complaining customer is becoming a form of customer abuse. Either HughesNet knows precisely the kind of speeds they're delivering to their customers, or their engineers have no performance measuring tools and are not competent to get a communications satellite into space (which obviously is not true).

 

What we need is fewer endless and evasive repetitions of the testmy.net routine — which is just a form of buck-passing and denial — and more information from HughesNet on what is going on and when it will be fixed.

 

maratsade
Distinguished Professor IV

Yes, it's clear the repeated requests for tests annoy you.  They're still part of the troubleshooting protocol; it's neither evasiveness nor abuse, it's how troubleshooting is done.  Hughesnet didn't invent this approach; it's done by pretty much all ISPs, irritating as it may be for users. 

 

 


@IntoTheWoods wrote:

This repeated and redundant demand for rigorous testmy.net results from each complaining customer is becoming a form of customer abuse. Either HughesNet knows precisely the kind of speeds they're delivering to their customers, or their engineers have no performance measuring tools and are not competent to get a communications satellite into space (which obviously is not true).

 

What we need is fewer endless and evasive repetitions of the testmy.net routine — which is just a form of buck-passing and denial — and more information from HughesNet on what is going on and when it will be fixed.

 


 

Speeds tested via my.hughesnet as above.

 

Previous results from mytest.net prior to calling them and from today:

My Speed :: 105 kbps

My Speed :: 195 kbps

On 25mb download.

Speeds are intermittent but consistently below 1mbps.  Occassionaly hit in the 900;s but 150 is around average.

Test done by hughesnet rep are consistent with my results and the results of the packet sniffers

Adapter is up to date and was fine on dishnet as was everything I have any control over.

Modem happy and consistently tests a ok.

 

GabeU
Distinguished Professor IV

@phalen

 

Please post your testmy.net results URL, as this is what the reps and engineers who work with this Support Community will need to address your speed issues.  

GabeU
Distinguished Professor IV


@IntoTheWoods wrote:

This repeated and redundant demand for rigorous testmy.net results from each complaining customer is becoming a form of customer abuse. Either HughesNet knows precisely the kind of speeds they're delivering to their customers, or their engineers have no performance measuring tools and are not competent to get a communications satellite into space (which obviously is not true).

 

What we need is fewer endless and evasive repetitions of the testmy.net routine — which is just a form of buck-passing and denial — and more information from HughesNet on what is going on and when it will be fixed.

 


And your assumption that every speed issue has the same cause is ignorance.  

I am curious, Gabe, have you seen many speed issues in the past 3 or 4 months that have been attributed to something other than over capacity?  

If so I would like to know the solutions that fixed those issues so I could try a few of them. 

thank you

GabeU
Distinguished Professor IV

Fixes for speed issues caused by things that are not beam related are not going to fix beam issues, and vice versa.  

 

And, as always, if a person is having a speed issue that is not on a beam that is acknowledged to be having issues, forgoing the requested tests and assuming it's a beam issue is their choice, but when they do so they do so that's on them.  

 

However, everyone is entitled to do what they want and assume what they want, even if that assumption is incorrect.  

maratsade
Distinguished Professor IV

ChaCha, that's an excellent question.  I  don't know about Gabe, but I've seen other issues, such as the dish not being properly aligned or having become misaligned; issues with the modem itself needing tweaking or outright changing; and other things.  Every time a user says there's a problem with their setup or their speed, it can be a myriad things, and sometimes it has to do with beam issues, but many times it's the customer's set up.  The company needs to do some triage whenever there's a problem; they need to see what it is that's causing the issue, as many times it's easy to solve (send the user a new modem, for instance), and other times it's part of a larger issue, and they need to know that too to report aggregate information to the engineers who are working on solving the issue.  It's not a simple matter; there are many variables involved.

Just to emphasize, here are all the things that can affect speed:
1. Distance from wifi or even how wifi is configured (affects speed as well as over-usage).

2. Corrupt DNS (even if you use Google's).

3. Issues with how the modem is configured, to include bad cable or improperly seated power plug.

4. Misaligned or banged up dish.

5. Faulty transceiver/feedhorn.

6. Foliage or other things blowing into radio route to the satellite (intermittent, yet regularly ocurring).

7. Cloud cover or severe weather also blocking the radio route to the satellite (sporadic and temporary).

8. Technical problems at the beam/gateway itself.

9. Congestion at the beam/gateway (incidentally, this doesn't necessarily mean it's oversold past capacity, just that there's a pileup of people spiking the system. An example is over-using a specific protocol happens to be using system resources greater than expected/planned, which happens to affect everyone else on that particular beam server).

10. Problems upstream from the gateway, such as misrouting at the backbone provider or outages anywhere within the path or problems with the destination site/server.

 

Edit: Forgot to add, congestion within your own setup: This is why they ask you to test with the LAN cable and ensure no one else is on at the time of testing. Speed usually = total expected speed / number of devices using it at one time.


* Disclaimer: I am a HughesNet customer and not a HughesNet employee. All of my comments are my own and do not necessarily represent HughesNet in any way.

Thank you Mark,

I have already reviewed possibilities 1-7 with support and these were eliminated.  So I guess it is out of my hands and is a technical issue.

 

I ran hughes speed test at 7 am with result of 21.84 Mbps and thought I had died and gone to heaven. Twenty minutes later, the slow down began and my screens froze.  Stepped away for 10 minutes and then ran speed test again at 7:30 am.  This time it was 0.39 Mbps.  Sigh.  Beginning to wonder if there could be some truth to the possiblity that this is a single commercial customer or hacker hogging the bandwidth.  How could the performance degrade so rapidly.  One minute I am flipping web pages like pages in a book, the next I am frozen.

maratsade
Distinguished Professor IV

ChaCha, I've seen that too (the service is fast early, but it gets slower as the day wears on), and it seems to me the slowdowns coincide with more people using the service.  Lately, though, the service has been consistent in the slower speed, so the slow speeds happen at all times, be it 6 am, 2 pm, or 11 pm.  Today the speeds are better, and the pattern of early=fast, later=slower is being repeated.   It may be caused by engineerings tweaking the system, I guess, or by a number of other things. 

 

Wouldn't the company know if there is a DDoS attack? 

 

Are business customers placed on the same beams as us mortals, or do they get dedicated service?


@ChaCha wrote:

I ran hughes speed test at 7 am with result of 21.84 Mbps and thought I had died and gone to heaven.


Best to use testmy.net and not Hughes' own speed test. Hughes' own speed test doesn't isolate the potential issues outside of Hughes' own network at a centralized location. It also may use technologies that may give inconsistent results depending upon browser.

Using testmy.net provides a better evaluation standard, the ability to select servers close to your gateway, and gives you a graph that quantifies the nature of the speed better.


* Disclaimer: I am a HughesNet customer and not a HughesNet employee. All of my comments are my own and do not necessarily represent HughesNet in any way.

@MarkJFine

 

Mark, all very true. But let's add an 11th possibility, the one toward which all the evidence in recent threads here points and the one that our adjunct instructors and our professors keep evading. That's a big, bad, new HughesNet problem.

 

When multiple users report the same symptoms at the same time, service providers know what they need to do. When I and my rural neighbors all call in and say that our power is out, a big truck soon appears, and the power comes back on.

 

 

maratsade
Distinguished Professor IV

The same symptom may come from different illnesses.


@IntoTheWoods wrote:

Mark, all very true. But let's add an 11th possibility


When the power is out, it is relatively easy to isolate and fix it without the need for rocket science. And in my neck of the woods, sometimes even that takes days. I've been without power for a week once so that explanation doesn't fly with me.

 

Your 11th possiblity is really the same as the Congestion possibility I described and no one is evading anything, certainly not me. I certainly hope you're not looking for an IEEE paper from me describing all the possible things that can contribute to congestion, because it would be lost on 99.9% of the people here. But I think you and I both know how it can happen. Just know that the tests first help verify there's a problem and allow the engineers to quantify the extent of the problem so they can eventually solve it.

When you have a many subscribers using new technologies that haven't been developed, let alone tested on a system that was designed and launched a year prior, how do you isolate and adapt the acceleration processing properly?

How do you deal with multiple subscribers that don't even know they're loading the system down with those technologies, when to them it's just easier to complain that it doesn't work?

You're a smart guy and have an exceptional background, similar my own, yet I don't think you're looking at the whole picture realistically.

 

I get you're angry (and we've all been there at one point or another - myself included). But you also know that making empty assumptions and accusations of foul play or skullduggery, mostly generated from that anger does no one any good (though it doesn't stop a good many people on here apparently). All it does is get everyone's dander up for no reason, not to mention how it spreads false rumors because people start believing it to be true - that is, for those that even bother reading any of it at all.


* Disclaimer: I am a HughesNet customer and not a HughesNet employee. All of my comments are my own and do not necessarily represent HughesNet in any way.
maratsade
Distinguished Professor IV

Extra kudos for using "skullduggery."

@MarkJFine

 

I'm not angry. I'm actually very cold blooded about it. Having lived in a rural area for the last nine years, I'm accustomed to struggling for Internet access, though I had hoped those days were over.

 

EchoStar 19 is an extraordinary piece of engineering. I've read everything about it that I could find. But HughesNet has about nine months of experience with it now, with customers on line. Before that, I believe they did about three months of testing. They should know that bird by now, and they have nine months of performance data and history to work with. As you guess, I do have a secondary agenda. That's to help give HughesNet fair warning that the great reviews that Gen5 got in its first months are in danger of going down the drain, causing HughesNet to slide right back into its old reputation of not meeting customer promises, with some of the industry's worst customer service. Again, Liz is wonderful, but she is just one person in a rather large company. Reading between the lines, I get the impression that the engineers sometimes blow her off, with the attitude that customer service has to jump through hoops to prove that there is a problem until the point is reached that engineers are cornered and can no longer deny it. In my tech career, I saw that over and over. As a manager who didn't have to, one of the reasons I went to Cisco school, Oracle DBA school, etc., learned C and some other languages, and knew Unix (not to mention our business) better than they did was so that engineers couldn't get away with trying to snow me. With 80 percent of the so-called engineers I ever worked with, denial was their first instinct. I hope your experience went better than that. 🙂

 

Companies should acknowledge and explain problems so that false rumors don't get started. That's why HughesNet should tell us what the problem is and tell us when it will be fixed. As for user forums, complaining customers are inevitable when there are widespread problems. Many pesky, routine, newbie problems can be fixed by user-to-user support. That's why even Apple supports user forums. But user forums light up like Christmas trees when companies drop the ball. Why fight the complaints rather than the problem?

 

@IntoTheWoods

I can assure you they're not fighting nor avoiding the problem(s). Some things are likely being prioritized over others for various reasons. The complexity is how those fixes can be engineered in order to fix those problems and perhaps enhance the overall system without creating new ones across 95 seperately served beams over 17 spatially disparate gateways. And that's just the known ones on J2. There are others served on J1.

 

Given our past experience, that should provide evidence of something else: Not enough engineering personnel on staff to deal with every possible known issue in the kind of timeframe people are demanding. Whether the margins are there to support increasing that staff is another story, but you can clearly see there are only 2 exceptional admins (both with the patience worthy of sainthood, imo) visible here, when there used to be several.

 

And yes, business culture in how they deal with these things has changed significantly. Even Apple isn't nearly as forthcoming as they once were (as if the past several months of security gaffes will show). And yes, I certainly made sure I knew when I was being snowed by an engineer/developer - they got away with it once or twice, but didn't last very long if it continued past that. In some cases I even 'helped' them to move on. 😒


* Disclaimer: I am a HughesNet customer and not a HughesNet employee. All of my comments are my own and do not necessarily represent HughesNet in any way.

@GabeU

 

You're missing my point. My point is that HughesNet has to be well aware that the current rash of slow-speed complaints is a problem on the HughesNet end. I want them to acknowledge that, tell us at least a little something about what the problem is, and tell us when they are going to fix it.

 

You are too quick with words like "ignorance." Just so you know, I have been on the Internet since UUCP days, a Unix user since1984. I have an extra-class amateur radio license, and I play with digital data modes for fun. I've never needed satellites until the past few years (other than the old analog systems I worked with in the newspaper business years ago that were used by the Associated Press and other news services). I rode the dot-com boom while in San Francisco from an office overlooking Fifth and Mission. I have Cisco router training. I have helped oversee the installation of large new copper and fiber networks. I have dealt with earlier (and more reliable) generations of data pipes including DSL, ISDN,  T1, etc. If I am ignorant, it's because I've been retired and away from it all for nine years, not because I don't understand troubleshooting. I've bought lots of data carried on lots of different pipes. In the past, if I told a provider what my speeds were, I was believed. But they knew it too, because (like HughesNet) they can see their end of the pipe. When providers didn't live up to their customer promises, they fixed it — quick.

 

This business I'm seeing here about network card drivers and such is just another red herring and a form of the blame-the-customer game. HughestNet tends to presume that its customers are ignorant and that all problems are on the customer's end. If it matters (it doesn't), I'm on a late 2015 27-inch iMac running Mac OS 10.11.6. I am 12 feet from the HT2000W router. My RSSI, noise, and Tx rate figures are always good and always have been. No, I will not run a copper wire to the router to eliminate WIFI from my testing, because the router is downstairs, and because WIFI clearly is not the problem.

 

If I were the only customer complaining, I'd look a little harder for a problem on my end and try to raise my confidence level from 99 to 99.9 percent. But all the evidence I've seen in this forum points to a HughesNet problem, and it's not just me. It's a new problem, since speeds were outstandingly good from April through September or so. It's entirely possible that our current slow speeds are not even a technical problem. For example, HughesNet might have sold data wholesale to a new commercial customer who is eating them, and us, alive. I am aware that that is speculative. But it looks like a load problem or demand problem. Morning speeds are down to a third or a quarter of what they once were, and evening speeds have fallen below 1Mpbs.