About MarkJFine

Kay, there are certain aspects of the system that have been known to trigger some internet security systems. Unless someone is physically hacked into your wifi or you already have a virus on your devices, it is virtually impossible for anyone to hack you on a double-NAT system such as this. There are some steps that you can take: 1. Enable MAC filtering on the wifi to only allow devices with a specific MAC address that you know about. 2. Completely scan every device on your system to ensure that there are no viruses nor any malware that are compromising your system. ... View more

Your computer screen has nothing to do with your internet provider. Nice try at a rant, though. ... View more

Youngster. I was a senior in high school. ... View more

"How do we know they cant change?"   Think this through: As @maratsade intimated, the system is designed with only a limited bandwidth for so many users in a specific region before the satellite is launched. It's not like you can just go to space and modify a satellite the same way you can add a blade to a server in a terrestrial trunking station. Giving everyone unlimited bandwidth on a limited system would render the whole system unusable.   Good luck with Starlink. Can't wait to see what happens to it once they get over-sold and people start complaining because they can't hurl any more LEOs into their constellation to increase bandwidth demand for a given geographical region. And, you may be waiting a long time: They're way, way, way, behind schedule. ... View more

Let me try to understand this: You're complaining because you're using up your data plan too quickly and buying an excessive amount of tokens on your own volition?   I don't claim to know your particular situation, but HughesNet can't change their business model - no satellite internet company can do what your're asking. However, there are things you can do to mitigate your problem, such as: 1. Cease random, individual streaming and/or watching videos on Facebook, etc.; 2. Use the lowest 'data saving' rates for whenever you do stream; 3. Disabling automatic updates on all devices and do these manually during the bonus period; 4. Disable routine backing up to the cloud which uses an exorbitant amount of data; and 5. Disable using wifi on phones (and any tablets with sim cards) to use their LTE/5G data plan instead.   There are many other like things you can do if you think it through and manage it accordingly. Just saying. ... View more

Well, the first thing you should know is that I've been a retired defense contractor for almost 10 years. Prior to that was involved with Army projects that included mobile satellite comms, so I'm not an expert but am 100% dangerous.   The second thing you should know is that technical companies will invest the most in R&D, maintenance, and overhead - not a whole lot on support. They certainly wouldn't pay premium engineering or management rates for contracted phone support, which is less than pennies on the dollar. Bottom line is that whether you're talking about HughesNet or someone else, you get what you pay for, and you're not getting anyone's best and brightest when you make that phone call. The reason why it is contracted overseas is you can't even find domestic labor to support it for those low wages.   Conversely, that kind of user help should not be confused with the support provided by the admins on this site, who are a part of HN corporate management and attend to this site as time allows. They are exceptionally knowledgeable, courteous, helpful, and quite a bit more interested and involved in customer satisfaction (and hopefully tons more expensive) than contracted phone help. ... View more

"too many customers per ground station" - not necessarily the case. Too many customers doing server-intensive things simultaneously on a particular ground station's IP gateway is more accurate. A better analogy is everyone on the eastern seaboard turning on their air conditioning at full bore at the same time on the hottest day of the year until the grid collapses. Or more commonly, if you've ever seen your non-filament bulbs dim, it's your power company drawing down to accommodate the load. The grid was designed for that many people using electricity, just not that much of a spike at one given time. There is no remedy, per se, you just wait until the surge subsides. You also can't add more ground stations, because you would also have to add and aim more downlinks from the satellite to those additional ground stations (there are currently 17 of them), not to mention having to construct/procure the facilities to house them. You would also have to add beams to the current suite of 97 beams currently covering the country, then re-map all of them so it covers each area equitably. But this point is moot: The current capacity is the capacity. You can't just roll a repair truck into space to add new spot beams and ground station downlinks from what currently exists. "Is there anyway to tell what ground station I'm using" - The ground station you're on is encoded in the IP gateway you're associated with. It's normally in the format J2xxxyyyHNSIGWzzzz, where xxx is the ground station location ID, yyy is the spot beam ID (for your general location), and zzzz is the particular IP gateway ID that you're currently associated with. You can find it on this page under Association Status. There's no way for you to know how many are loading your IP gateway, but if you feel it's being too sluggish you can try to re-associate to another less congested one by rebooting your modem (as I previously mentioned). The system will then attempt to pick the least congested IPGW available and put you on it. ... View more

It is congestion: Other people are trying to stream at the same time, which is pounding the **bleep** out of the ground station. It doesn't take much to disrupt one person streaming, and it doesn't take too many people trying to stream to disrupt a ground station. Streaming is a very ping-intensive operation and the inherent latency impacts the timing required. It just gets exponentially worse as more people are banging away at constantly eroding time windows until the system just becomes unresponsive. ... View more

Unsure if this works in Office 365 Windows, but I will have several spreadsheets open in Excel and run into the close all dilemma. Learned that Ctrl-Q will close all, but Ctrl-W will close just that one you're using at the moment (use the Cmd key (⌘) instead of Ctrl on Macs). Pretty sure that works in Word and Powerpoint as well. ... View more

The WiFi itself is how the satellite internet is delivered to your devices and is completely independent upon satellite latency and speed. Depending upon the protocol used, your WiFi signal may use multiple channels to widen the available bandwidth from 20MHz, up to 80MHz. The only way this can be impeded is if you have one or more neighbors whose personal WiFi may be using one (or more) of those channels, therefore interfering with it and creating a problem with your local WiFi usage. Usually, WiFi systems will analyze the local environment and pick the first unused set of available channels, but there are WiFi channel scanners for computers that can detect them as well.   Regarding the latency values in speed tests: You shouldn't put any faith in them, primarily because of the way satellite internet works. The latency tests weren't designed for the inherent latency that occurs due to the sheer distances involved, nor the additional effects of beam and gateway loading from high intensity of pings that result from server-intense activities such as streaming. The results would be all over the place at any given time. The only credible latency test that should be used is the one provided in the System Control Center's Connectivity Test, which provides an accurate assessment of the latency between your computer and your particular ground station (Wyoming) that includes radio signal latency as well as any processing delays due to user congestion. Given that, any additional latency from the internet backbone, that the ground station is connected to, is negligible for all intents and purposes (basically milliseconds as compared to 600+ milliseconds). ... View more

The satellite is approximately 38,000 km from your dish. Even if your ground station were in the next county it would still be a 76,000 km trip to the gateway, and a 152,000 km round trip. The latency on that is still a half a second, given the speed of light. Latency has nothing to do with the location of the ground station and has everything to do with the fact that the satellite is about 36,000 km above the equator in a geosynchronous orbit. As for many lanes, look at an open source satellite coverage map (pick one, there are many): Each spot beam is aimed at a specific region of the country. The beams are serviced by and distributed amongst the ground stations in order to try to balance the potential population per ground station. What mysterious undocumented lanes were you looking for in particular?   Bottom line: What are you talking about? Or, did you just make all that stuff up? Edit: And as for "switching the channel", sometimes the IP gateway that you're associated to gets overused. Simply rebooting the modem will re-associate you to a lesser used IP gateway... it's not magic and you didn't need a tech to do that. ... View more

Don't hijack a thread you already hijacked... got it. Cool. ... View more

"there are areas that are having trouble with their Beam"   Last I looked J2 had a minimum of 97 spot beams being routed across 17 disparate ground stations. These beams are continually maintained in order to ensure proper coverage is attained. I'm pretty sure that excuse is given to uncontrollable callers in attempt to finally placate them. ... View more

@JB39 Mainly because we've learned not to respond to your trolls.   This is not social media. Each thread is the original poster's de facto 'trouble ticket'. I am responding just to tell you that it's not real helpful to them to spam everyone's posts with your experiences and irrelevant comments. It just confuses things for them as well as the site admins. ... View more

It's quite possible your account was hacked from responding to a phishing scam email, thus providing your access info to the scammer, who actually did this. Things like this happen a lot more often than you'd think and is a more likely explanation. ... View more

🥁 ... View more

Glad you got some speed back, but just want to point out a few things: 1. Not every school in the country got out the same time as your local schools. The beam you're on covers a wide swath of your local area, but the gateway on the other side of the satellite includes 15 or such beams from various parts of the country. Congestion can occur at any part of the system and therefore from any part of the country. Many schools got out mid-June. 2. I also doubt the same amount of people are using the network at 3am, however, many people can automatically schedule the bulk of their upgrade downloads (and Netflix downloads) at that time. Also consider that if you're on the East Coast that's midnight on the West Coast. And if you think kids with no school the next day aren't up late secretly binging all the Marvel and Star Wars stuff off of Disney+ at that hour... but hey, in my day it was comic books and a flashlight. 👀 3. Also consider that streaming is a very server-intensive activity that will load down a satellite system with an inherent 5-600mS latency in a heartbeat. If you like, I can point you to the details of how that happens and may sporadically happen throughout the day. However, you need to know is that streaming is greatly impacted by latency, not speed, and that latency is impacted by users loading down the system. ... View more

We'd been getting these massive black ones in hordes. I ended up moving all the furniture into the center of the room, spraying Raid Max Ant & Roach around the circumference of the room. Worked like a charm and haven't seen them since. Just noticed them this week doing a virtual Jan 6th on my driveway and front porch... did the same but in the exterior and not a one crossed the line alive. Stuff works great. ... View more

Squirrel, rabbit, deer, fox, bear, or coyote. Take your pick, and those are just the mammals. The ants are just horrendous this year. ... View more

I don't believe that it's operational. ... View more