I am a new Gen5 customer. We've been on not quite a month, and my concern was the speed after the data plan was depleted. So with a week to go, we hit the limit and are now "degraded". The 20 day grace period was nice, but delayed my finding out the true "unlimited" speed. I now have data and depending on what you may expect, can be good news or bad news. For me, it's good. We live at what I call "the edge of technology". While only 15 miles from town and gas, stores, etc., we are 4.5 miles from the nearest DSL node. At the end of the power line and no cell service. When we moved here 2 years ago I asked around and was told Hughesnet was NOT good. We opted for DSL, in spite of being beyond the so-called limit for DSL (distance). We knew it would be slow, but were willing to accept what we could get. We ended up putting in two DSL lines in order have what we needed. Speed was about .5mbs download and .25mbs upload. OK for most of what we needed, and we could actually stream a Netflix with only one or two buffers if everything else was shut down on that particlur modem. Gen5 came out, and I researched what I could find out, and decided even if it delivered half of what was promised after being "downgraded" it was better that what we had. And it is. Consistent 1.75mbs download, and (I'm suprised at this) 2.5 - 3.5mbs upload. Netflix streams just fine, and everything else is good. 3+ times faster than what we had, even when "throttled". S0, there are some hard numbers for someone wondering. The good news - we are saving about $45/mo over what were paying for DSL. The bad news - a minor dusting of snow shuts it down, and we have to sweep off the dish. I'm probably going to add some heaters to the dish if this is a really big deal this winter. So far, I'm a happy customer. Your mileage may vary, but it's working well for us.
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