About IntoTheWoods

Update: I've found that if I turn off so-called web acceleration, the irrational behavior stops, though nothing is any faster (less than 1 Mbps).   My guess would be that the servers that handle so-called web acceleration are overloaded, like everything else, or they've been messed up all day, and HughesNet either didn't, or couldn't, fix them.   ... View more

@C0RR0SIVE   Corrosive, that's an interesting idea about congested frequency spectrum. Nevertheless, that's a known, and it should have been predictable right from the start. I am totally untechnical on how marvels of engineering such as EchoStar 19 work. But it seems to me that all factors would have been known in advance — not only the bird's capacity but also the spectrum available to it.   Nothing makes sense to me other than greed on HughestNet's part and more demand for Gen5 than they anticipated (and which they unhesitatingly took advantage of). Please correct me where I'm wrong. But I think this is a business and management problem, not a technical problem.     ... View more

@maratsade   Of course speeds vary. I'm getting 440 kbps tonight, which is about what I've got most nights for the past month. I believe that's 1/56th of 25Mbps. Are you arguing that that's reasonable and that customers should not have higher expectations?   ... View more

Just incredible. HughesNet is continuing to sell to new customers who are getting speed of less than 1 Mpbs right from the start.   Middles, keep complaining.   ... View more

@esbohannon   esbohannon, when Gen5 customers first came on line in April, speeds were incredible, often over 50 Mbps. However, evidence is mounting that HughesNet has radically oversold Gen5 so that the system is now overloaded way beyond its design capacity, with evening speeds around the dial-up level. Personally I am skeptical that any technical solution exists. But we must all complain together  — and stay on it — until enough time has passed to determine whether HughesNet actually can service the customers they've sold with their promise of providing true broadband. If HughesNet cannot provide true broadband to their customers, then non-technical remedies will be needed. Those remedies cannot be discussed here because forum rules forbid it.     ... View more

@Dalecway   Dalecway, please don't give up. Stay on the case. We're all in this with you.   ... View more

@DenJo   DenJo, please don't give up. Even in the current customer-hostile, corporate-friendly political environment, let's assume for now that HughesNet understands that their corporate future is rosiest if they honor their customer agreements.     ... View more

@jezra   Jezra, you are the umpteenth person to report that HughesNet has oversold and overloaded the system. The lack of business integrity that represents is mind-boggling. They must be assuming that regulatory agencies will not hold them to account and that they can get away with it.   The forum software here actually will intercept and block any references that customers may make in a post to certain remedies that would hold HughesNet to account. We must not be intimidated.   Because a number of customers have reported that tech support told them that HughesNet has oversold the system, it would seem that the engineers are in rebellion. We want them on our side, though management will almost certainly take steps to squelch their engineers and "discipline" them if they tell customers that HughesNet oversold the service.   Please stay in the forum, and don't give up.     ... View more

Gen5 worked great for the first few months, but download speeds have dropped very fast during the last month or two. Two nights ago there was a total Gen5 outage that lasted for several hours. As I have mentioned in other replies here, HughesNet has not fully disclosed the nature of the problem, though they acknowledge some problems and say that they are working on it.  Several customers have been told, in calls from "engineers," that HughesNet has oversold the service so that the satellite is now overloaded beyond its design capacity. Please stay tuned. Please do not give up. HughesNet customers must hold together and demand that HughesNet provide what we were promised — true broadband. ... View more

Hi Newtonf. We are all pretty much in that boat now. After excellent speeds for the first few months of Gen5, many customers are now reporting evening speeds slower than 1 Mbps. HughesNet has not fully disclosed what is going on (though they have acknowledged some problems in a limited way and say that they are working on it). But the unconfirmed scuttlebutt, based on multiple customers quoting what they were told in calls from "engineers," is that HughesNet has oversold Gen5 and that the load now exceeds the satellite's design capacity. The speeds we see are consistent with that. My evening speeds are ALWAYS 1 Mbps or lower of late, and the best morning speeds are usually around 19Mbps.   Please don't give up. It's important that HughesNet customers stick together and demand what we were promised — true broadband.   ... View more

It's simple only to a narrow, legalistic, authoritarian, machine-oriented way of thinking that sees human beings as just a bunch of users. For some reason, people who think that way seem to often end up in tech support. When I was in the industry, I did everything possible to help them find employment elsewhere.   ... View more

@GabeU   Your apologetics would be rational if HughesNet's reputation with previous systems was any better. But they are well on their way to demonstrating that they're a company that can take an extraordinary piece of engineering like EchoStar 19 and wreck it in a matter of months.   ... View more

Thanks, Corrosive...   Actually required is one thing (though regulations can be changed). Good business practice is another. Trust in a company's integrity and competence is a business asset that translates into dollar value. Part of that dollar value is increased revenue in the future, as opposed to lost customers, regulatory complaints, and other matters that GabeU is eager to remind us are not allowed under the terms and conditions of this forum.   ... View more

Corrosive, thank you so much for this information. You clearly have sources that most of us don't have. I'm sure you agree that we customers are entitled to full disclosure from HughesNet about what is going on, as well as a good-faith account of what will be done to fix it.   ... View more

Three replies in four minutes by others whose service also is down.   It's tempting to silently, passively, wait until service comes back up. Don't! Never fail to complain, time consuming and irritating as it is (and is meant to be). Because I have lost confidence both in HughesNet's business integrity AND in their technical competence, I don't doubt that they are testing customer limits to discover what is the very least level of service that we will tolerate before we escalate to levels that HughesNet cannot ignore. We want what we were promised: True broadband with an industry-acceptable standard for uptime.   ... View more

@GabeU   Gabe, you ceased being helpful long ago. Your definition of spam is perverse. Why don't you consider taking a vacation from this forum until  (if it ever does) HughesNet gets its act together. ... View more

@GabeU   Then we may have to see how far we can get with informal actions.     ... View more

@ChaCha   ChaCha, I have edited this post to try to be a little more patient. However, HughesNet does need to tell customers like us what the problem is and give us a time line on when the problem will be solved. I'm going to try to bite my tongue for a while.     ... View more

This points to another technical mystery that I don't understand. If people like me are seeing speeds like 402 kbps because lots of other customers are streaming HD video, or even — heaven forfend — 4K UHD video, then how could it be possible that those people would be able to go right on with their streaming while I'm getting 402 kbps and waiting for a simple HTML page to load? If everybody is getting more or less equal bandwidth, then it seems to me that it would take an outrageous amount of streaming for everybody to get only 402 kbps of the total available bandwidth.   As for anyone who may be streaming 4K video, they'd exhaust their monthly data and go into FAP in no time. Such behavior would seem to be self-limiting.         ... View more

@MarkJFine   Thank you, Mark.   HughesNet does promote and sell the service based on the ability to stream. It's one of the reasons I went for it, and no doubt that's true of others as well. I figured they knew they had the demand handled. Given HughesNet's experience with satellites, with customer behavior, and with the network loads created by streaming, it is well nigh inconceivable to me that HughesNet could not forecast, and was not prepared for, the streaming load.   Frankly the idea of real-time video streaming is offensive to me anyway for the peaks it causes — for movie-length material, anyway. I'd much rather have a method of downloading video in advance, in the middle of the night. Apple's iTunes is the only way I know of to buy or rent video, download it, store it on disk, and play it later. But iTunes lacks any scheduling or metering system, or any effective way of restarting aborted downloads.   ... View more

@MarkJFine   Mark, how would you define "congested"?   Are you saying that congestion is a problem that HughesNet can fix?   ... View more

At dslreports.com, there is a HughesNet forum, fairly active, with technically knowledgeable forum members. One member, because of the rapid deterioriation of Gen5 download speeds, says he filed a complaint with the appropriate federal agency, forcing callbacks from HughesNet.   He wrote this in the dslreports.com forum:   "Well received a call from HughesNet Wednesday morning and the 'engineer' stated they, HN has had an unanticipated number of new subscribers for their Gen5 service and the beam, which he did not specify, I am on is running is currently way over its engineered capacity."   I don't think we have enough information to know whether this is authoritative, but it's certainly consistent with the complaints we're seeing in this forum.     ... View more

@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?   ... View more

@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.     ... View more

@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.   ... View more

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.   ... View more

Please add beam 83 to the list of problem beams, where I measured a pathetic 455 kbps just now.   This is obviously a general problem, and to blow off customers with the testmy.net routine is just evasive. HughesNet knows perfectly well the kind of speeds they're delivering. They can measure it as easily as we can.   What the dickens happened? I've been on Gen5 for eight months now. The first few months were fantastic. Now I'm lucky to get 10Mbps during the morning and 1.5Mbps at night.   ... View more