About GW

I suggest it's time for Hughes to replace all of the hardware that has ever been connected to the old coax. There are some very weird things that happen with this service. Things that defy logic and understanding. Although I suffered with different problems than you for more than two years (with multiple  hardware replacements and continual intervention by our advocates here and the "experts" they work with) absolutely no progress was made until the coax was replaced. This cured the second of my extremely odd persistent error conditions. Still, the original low speed problem that plagued my Gen4 system since Day 1 rolled on even though "engineering" continued analyzing while claiming it didn't exist and/or couldn't be fixed because of a variety of reasons. Another year+ beyond the coax replacement and another year+ of continual effort by Amanda, Liz and myself, it's finally fixed. What eventually fixed it was re-replacement of the modem/power supply and radio AFTER the coax and original ground block were replaced. These were the third copies of modem/PSU/ODU installed for me but now my peak speeds ranging down below 100 kbps are done. It's still not perfect because of the overloaded beam but just about anything is better than a 200-400 kbps average on any Sunday No matter how good Hughes thinks (or wants us to believe) their network expertise and remote and/or on-site diagnostics are, my case history shows this to be the polar opposite of true. There are too many moving parts and the system is far too complex to be properly analyzed for every individual situation. Amanda and Liz will work themselves to a nub trying to resolve our problems for us but the truth is, when they are given bad information by their network systems or those who run those systems, there are no solutions. I have so much respect for the Official Reps who help us in this forum but I feel so very badly for them because I know how much pure malarky is dished out to them to supposedly help them in their efforts to help us. As for clouds/weather doing this to you, I don't believe this could be a factor unless you live right on the ragged edge of coverage for your beam. A thick deck of stratus clouds will drop my signal a few points. Massive cumulonimbus obscuring the view between my site and the satellite will drop my signal more than a few points but we're talking a drop from a severe clear peak of up to 140 down to 80-120. It's only heavy precip that takes me out of the game  and depending on severity, SQF can go to nothing. I hope you can get this solved. It's very unfortunate but the effort required for getting our Hughes service to function properly can approach the level of a part-time job. ... View more

Ewww, yeah that would leave a mark. I forgot to mention the 190 MB Bonus Bytes that our gizmo's have used in the last week doing whatever it is they do when they stay up all night 🙂 ... View more

Thanks for the translation EDN. I looked this up as koverter and the norton data base knew nothing ... View more

My cheap ASUS doesn't give that depth of info but my Hughes Status Meter says we've used 588 MB from 10/4 through right now. That doesn't seem like much to me but I guess it's a whole new world now that I'm not constantly running speed tests. ... View more

Oh my! Too funny Gwalk. ... View more

They sometimes hide things they don't want people to know. Changes they're not particularly proud of and mistakenly "letting the cat out of the bag" early are examples. ... View more

Good work Gabe. I see it's still available from a link in an associated topic. I thought it was only available through the "Follow" links that get sent out. ... View more

No but I am the one who originally coined the terminology. My post was about a site problem I discovered in April 2015. It was good for a ~100 MB per hour data drain and provided a good example of how DDDD can come from the most seemingly innocent sources. One of the Champions put SquidGuard on it and found the page was constantly refreshing images and data even though nothing ever changed without pushing the refresh button. ... View more

Yep, there are other ways but none are as quick and easy to identify when a specific problem began and when it tends to occur. ... View more

I just realized why they closed it. I included pictures of an extremely valuable dashboard tool that I used to isolate and identify the drain. This is a tool that they've subsequently taken away from us and given us a cheap substitute. ... View more

Doug, one thing you will notice with noscript is a lot of things on the internet just don't work but you can push the toolbar button to allow functionality of the things you probably are wanting to use. Sometimes you have to drill deeper and temporarily authorize individual components or use "Temporarily allow all this page". If you haven't done so you should also change all your plug-ins to "Ask to activate" and the ones that don't offer that option, shut them down, then go allow it if and when it's ever needed. Edit: You should also know that there are some very poorly designed websites that will burn your data like crazy. For an example, the DHL international tracking page will burn roughly 100 MB per hour if it's left open in a tab. And that will continue 24/7. I think the DHL page does a completely unnecessary refresh every few seconds so there's not really any program to deal with stupidity like that. Maybe your duplicolor site is one like that. I forget who it is but one of the Champions has a program that can identify what goes on with those particularly insidious sites. Another edit: I was going to give you a link to that old thread that deals with the Dreaded Data Drain Disease but the moderators have hidden it with this reason: Archived and Closed This conversation is no longer open for comments or replies and is no longer visible to community members. The community moderator provided the following reason for archiving: Older than one year ... View more

Have you noticed a difference ABP? They started that about 5 years ago and there's a check box to disallow it. I never bothered with it and never saw a difference. There's a distinct possibility I don't use sites that offer "acceptable" ads. Haha, there's an oxymoron. ... View more

That's huge. The FW update for my ASUS was 6 MB. ... View more

Hey Pete, it's not that slow. Even when the Hughes is running super bad, I bet you could burn up 50 gig is under 6 months 🙂 ... View more

Oh yeah, that was KB's of ram back then. ... View more

Ah don't you miss dialing up the BBS at 14.4 behind a 286 with 256 MB of ram and never filling up a 40 MB hard drive? Not! ... View more

The 5 am and 7 am are incongruent but otherwise you're doing well. ... View more

I'm sure there are some really bad routers but they're hard for me to find. I used to have a high dollar Cradlepoint that cost more than $300 back in the day. When I started transitioning from where I was at to Hughes I bought a dirt cheap Rosewill to compare. Six of one and a half dozen of the other. No discernible difference at all so I sold the very expensive Cradlepoint, along with signal amp, cabling, antenna and modem with my account for more than I paid for it. I used the Rosewill for almost 5 years and decided save it as an emergency backup unit. I put a new ASUS into service and stored the Rosewill. I'm very pleased with my cheap routers. After sale prices, promo codes and rebates, I have $21.49 invested in the pair of them. ... View more

I worked my buns off all day on the internet. My wife did quite a bit too. We used a total of 416 MB so far today on all computers. And that's with no speed tests yet. ... View more

Unless dealing with whitelisted sites, the extension NoScript automatically nukes everything including HTML5 as well as XSS, CSRF router hacking, DNS rebinding and Clickjacking. It also implements the DoNotTrack tracking opt-out proposal by default,  joining AdBlock Plus in this experiment. ... View more

Gwalk, Thinking back, my original gen4 installer cut off the terminal of the spare coax at the dish so that end was open for two weeks with no protection. When I complained about this, he got off his ladder and went directly to the other end at the ground block and cut it off. When I asked him why he did this he said Hughes requires it. Of course, this (and installer #2 from the same company) were the ones who refused to ground the radio to Hughes specs. When the third technician came out to do the proper grounding, he replaced the terminals and after that everything was always protected. Interesting thing here is this third tech is the one who came out last week and finally put an end to the atrocious primetime speed problems I've always had with this system. ... View more

Indeed, If the unused cable and ground block terminals haven't remained plugged with grease, they're probably corroded. When I went to gen4, I made sure the extra terminals were plugged for some redundancy. It apparently didn't work. ... View more

I had the twin coax too. Switching cables did not help. It was a genuine head scratcher that drove us nuts for a very long time. At that point, there was truly nothing left to do but change the coax. ... View more

The eventual solution for my SQF 15/failure to associate error was replacing the coax. That provided the instant cure. Before that was done, disconnecting power and coax was the only way to get it back online. ... View more

NoScript is a very good addon for Firefox. I've been using that forever along with ABP. ... View more

Ok Liz, great news. After more than two years, seven technician visits, four power supplies, three modems, three radios, two ground blocks, a complete run of new coax, and more of my time than is required for a decent part-time job, my perennially sick Gen4 system is finally fixed. The major dysfunctional problem (persistent SQF 15 error) took 6 months to figure out and repair while the slow speed problem carried on as consistently and predictably as the sunrise from June of 2014 until Thursday. It's really amazing how long this has continued despite constant intervention with at least a half dozen so-called escalations, a huge amount of case numbers and an impressive assortment of "engineers" both before and after you and Amanda got involved. Here are some prime examples of the service I suffered with for more than two years (June 2014 through June 2016) followed by a snapshot of what my system did today. And now today. And now to the current forum favorite, testmy. To refresh, Sunday performance for 9/11 between 9 AM and 11 PM was 277 kbps average download. The average for the same hours on Sunday 9/18 was 567 kbps. Today's Sunday 9 AM - 11 PM average was 15.89 Mbps. It did hit the wall a little bit during the usual 9-10 PM time frame  but 3 Mbps is so much more tolerable than 38 kbps. Funny thing is, except for the bad coax causing the SQF 15 errors, I'll bet the speed problems, all the way back, boil down to modem software problems and initial installs not being properly done. Regardless, it sure is nice to have internet that works on the weekend 🙂 ... View more

And sorry to be offensive Gwalk but we're not all always here looking for help or advice or to drop a rabid rant. Sometimes we just want to write an essay or an editorial 😉 ... View more

Too funny Gwalk. Thanks for the lesson but no testing is in order here. This problem was solved nearly five months ago. The only lesson here is in the value of the hourly chart. Without that, it would have been more difficult to find and confirm the phantom data drain. Read up above and you'll see what happened. It's described in detail. At this point this is a pointless conversation. In your rush to give advice when none is needed or appropriate, you completely missed the point. Chris (Official Rep) got the point, acknowledged my suggestions and sent it up the ladder. ... View more

Many people who have been with Hughes for years know the value of this tool. Most others will never know it exists and that's unfortunate. It's a pain converting from eastern but that's not as bad as dealing with zulu time. It's just as accurate as the line charts. My line chart for August 1 tells me I downloaded 168 MB. My hourly graph tells me I downloaded 168.02 MB that day. My line chart from yesterday tells me I downloaded 1119 MB. The hourly graph tells me I downloaded 1118.93 MB. The trouble with the line chart is it gives me no info about when I did what. The hourly chart gives me the hourly usage even when my LAN cable is disconnected. Like this. ... View more

Well we still have this one: http://customercare.myhughesnet.com/frmUsage.cfm Yes, we do but how do we get there from here if we don't have the link? It's no longer accessible from the old customer care page and it's been gone from the dashboard for a long time. The phone reps claim it no longer exists. ... View more