About lakeland4

Thank you for the update.  I look forward to hearing from you soon.   FYI: I posted the text above shortly after your post last week and realized today that it is not there.  Hope it does not disappear this time. ... View more

Thanks for the suggestion, but there is no option to adjust the resolution when watching Prime Video on my Toshiba FireTV.  ... View more

I want to thank all of you who dealt with the issue that occurred in this thread in early December.   Below is the latest update on video streaming.    1/02/2023 – 8:00pm – VDS ON – 1 hour and 20 minute movie on Prime Video.  30+ seconds initial load time, then the screen momentarily showed ‘Slow Internet Connection’.  Immediately afterward the video started and was extremely pixelated for about 3 minutes, then buffered for 20+ seconds.  As before the screen momentarily showed ‘Slow Internet Connection’ and immediately afterward the video started. The video then buffered after 5 minutes, then 6 minutes later and again after an additional 8 minutes, each time for 10-20 seconds.  During this period the picture was noticeably pixelated at times.   At this point I turned the VDS OFF and restarted the video at the stopping point.  After 30+ seconds of buffering watched the rest of the video with no additional buffering but occasionally the picture was slightly pixelated.   I look forward to when engineering has an update on improving video streaming with VDS ON. ... View more

Below is the latest update on video streaming. 12/01/2022 – 7:00pm – VDS ON – 45 minute show on Prime Video. 45+ seconds initial load time, then screen when black. After a couple of minutes restarted the show. Again buffered for 45+ seconds and the screen momentarily showed ‘Slow Internet Connection’. The show began and was very pixelated for about 2 minutes, buffered for 30+ seconds and then showed the ‘Slow Internet Connection’ screen. Selected ‘Keep Watching’ and the show continued for 5 minutes with the picture noticeably pixelated. After an additional 5 minutes with a normal picture it buffered again for 30+ seconds then showed the ‘Slow Internet Connection’ screen. Selected ‘Keep Watching’ and the show came back on with a frozen screen. Quit watching the frozen screen after several minutes. At this point I turned the VDS OFF and restarted the show at the stopping point. After 30+ seconds of buffering watched the remaining 30+ minutes of the show with no problems. It is quite obvious that the Video Data Saver is not functioning very well. Was improving VDS part of the update in my area to address the performance? I will start watching the next video stream with the VDS ON and keep you updated. ... View more

I never received a notification email regarding your recent post so VDS was left off during the Prime Video stream described below.   11/11/2022 – 8:00pm – VDS Off – 40 minute show. 30+ seconds initial load time, then slightly pixelated for first few minutes.  The only issue during the remainder of the show was when the stream was intentionally stopped 3 times, each time it took 30+ seconds to load.   VDS will now be on. ... View more

That is good news! I will continue to update you on the streaming performance.  Should I stay with VDS OFF or switch back to ON?   Thank you for letting me know your colleagues will be available to assist me in your absence. ... View more

A quick update on Prime Video streaming.   10/22/2022 – 7:00pm – VDS Off - 1 hour show. No problems ... View more

Here is a quick update on the Prime Video streaming.   10/13/22 – VDS OFF – 8:30pm – Second half of Thursday Night Football on Prime Video.  20+ seconds initial load time, then varied between slightly and extremely pixelated the rest of the game, which included 7 instances of buffering for 10-15 seconds each.  The pixelating was so bad I would have stopped watching very quickly except I was interested in the outcome. ... View more

Here is an update on the video streaming and download speed.   The Video Data Saver is ON.   Live Stream: 9/11/2022 – 10:45am – 1 hour church service on Vimeo. No problems until the screen completely froze 2/3 through the service.  Closed and restarted the streaming and no problems afterward.   Streaming Video: 9/9/2022 – 8:00pm – 1 hour show on Prime Video. No problems   9/12/2022 - 8:00pm – Movie on Prime Video.  30+ seconds initial load time, then very pixelated. A few minutes later buffered for 30+ seconds then ‘Slow Internet Connection’ was shown. Buffered another 13 times, 15-20 seconds each, spread out over the remaining movie time.   Turned off Video Data Saver on 9/15/2022   Streaming Video: 9/15/22 – VDS OFF – 8:00pm - 1 hour show on Prime Video.  30+ seconds initial load time, then very pixelated.  Buffered for 15-20 seconds after 15 minutes, then buffered again 15 minutes later for 30+ seconds and ‘Slow Internet Connection’ was shown.  After that, it buffered another 14 times, 20+ seconds each, spread out over the remaining 30 minutes of show time.   10/2/22 – VDS OFF – 11:15am – Church service on You Tube. No problems   Download Speed: The observed download speed has not changed since the last post.  It is still slower than the time between the repointing of the dish at the end of April through the end of May.    I will continue to keep you updated. ... View more

Below is the system performance update for the last 3 weeks.    Summary: Intermittent starting and stopping has virtually ended.   Live streaming using Vimeo was good while video streaming using Prime Video was terrible.  Video Data Saver was enabled and no resolution settings were changed.   The observed download speed is still slower than the time between the repointing of the dish at the end of April through the end of May.    More Detail: Live Stream: 8/21/2022 – 10:45am – Church service on Vimeo - No problems   Since early July there have been no issues with Vimeo.   Streaming Video: 8/19/2022 – 8:00pm – Movie on Prime Video.  30+ seconds initial load time, approx. 5 minutes later buffered for 30+ seconds then ‘Slow Internet Connection’ was shown. Pixelated slightly for several minutes, then buffered another 22 times, 15-20 seconds each, spread out over the remaining 1 hour 20 minutes of movie time.   8/20/2022 – 8:30pm – Attempted to watch a movie on Prime Video.  45+ seconds initial load time, then ‘Slow Internet Connection’ was shown.  Five times over the next 5 minutes of movie time, the video buffered approx. 30 seconds each time, then became very pixelated the following 10-15 seconds.  Quit watching.   8/21/2022 – 8:00pm – Movie on Prime Video.  30+ seconds initial load time then pixelated slightly for a short time.  After approx. 25 minutes, the video buffered 9 times, 15-20 seconds each time, spread out over the remaining hour of movie time.   Since early July Amazon Prime Video has been terrible.  Of the 5 movies we started we stopped watching 3 of them.  The two videos we did watch to the end buffered on average every 6 minutes, 10-15 seconds each time.  This is a major reason why we have not used Prime Video very much.  What can be done for it to be improved?   I will continue to keep you updated. ... View more

Given the responses I am glad I asked that question!   To help the engineers evaluate the changes I will leave the Video Data Saver enabled and not change any resolution settings.   The HughesNet My Account/Usage/Video Data Saver webpage states the Video Data Saver will ‘deliver a DVD quality experience (up to 480p)’.  I do hope this is the case. The size of the room and the TV makes DVD quality adequate and is preferred to keep the download usage as small as possible, ... View more

I appreciate both you and engineering continuing to work on improving the system performance and will keep providing you with my observations.   Regarding the Video Data Saver setting, I do not touch it so it should stay enabled.   What I have done over the years when streaming is manually set the picture quality resolution to the lowest possible setting.  The main reason is to reduce the data usage as much as possible to help stay under the download limit but it is also done when the picture quality is very poor and you try anything to improve it.   This leads me to a question about the Video Data Saver.  Does manually setting the picture quality resolution take precedence over the Video Data Saver setting?   Thanks for your help. ... View more

During the past 4 weeks the observed overall system performance is still not as good as it was between the repointing of the dish at the end of April through the end of May but has improved somewhat over what was described from the end of May through early July in the 7/22/2022 post:   The intermittent service stops and starts are less frequent and have not lasted as long but are still occurring.   There have been no significant problems with the live and video streams as listed below:   Live Stream: 7/10/2022 – 10:30 – Church service on Vimeo – Set quality to 240p - Slow loading but no problems afterwards   7/24/2022 – 10:30 – Church service on Vimeo – Set quality to 240p - Slow loading, afterward only buffered once for less than 10 seconds.  Otherwise no problems   7/31/2022 – 9:30 – Church service on Vimeo – Set quality to 240p - No problems     Streaming Video: 7/24/2022 – 7:00 to 10:00 – Watched three 45 minute shows on PBS.org. Set quality to 360p. No problems.   The observed download speed over the past 4 weeks is still noticeably slower than between the repointing of the dish at the end of April through the end of May but has improved somewhat over the speed from the end of May through early July.    I will keep you updated. ... View more

My message finally posted!   Since early July I have made a dozen changes to my message trying to get it to post.  None of these attempts made any significant changes to the overall format or length of the message.    I got to thinking that my last couple of posts worked and were much shorter than the one that kept failing to post.  I reviewed my previous messages that did post and the longest one had a character with spaces count of 2650.  The message that would not post had a character with spaces count of 3295. I guessed the limit was 3000, so this last time I edited the message to lower the character with spaces count to 2917 and it posted!   What looks to be the cause of my message not posting is that there is a character with spaces limit at or slightly above 3000.  If that is the case, there is no actual error message.  The message you are attempting to post just does not post.  I did search the HughesNet websites and did not find a limit mentioned anywhere.   I deeply appreciate the HughesNet Community’s help in solving the problems that I have faced since early June in both connecting to and posting to this topic.  The issues and solutions are described in the topics ‘Cannot Connect to ‘Upgraded to Gen5 and speeds are still extremely slow at times’’ and  ‘Cannot Post to ‘Upgraded to Gen5 and speeds are still extremely slow at times’’.   Now we can get back to solving the issues listed in my previous post.   EDIT: There has been an update to the ‘Cannot Post to ‘Upgraded to Gen5 and speeds are still extremely slow at times’’ topic. ... View more

If you can read this it means I have developed a work around to finally post my system performance observations taken from the end of May through early July.   As I stated in my 5/25/2022 post, the overall system performance had significantly improved since the dish was repointed on 4/25/2022.  However, the overall system performance since the end of May is as bad as it was prior to the repointing of the dish at the end of April.    Service stops and starts intermittently Since the end of May the overall service has intermittently stopped and restarted.  When attempting to access the internet all devices will suddenly hang.  You may eventually receive an error such as ‘This site cannot be reached’ or the downloading of files will fail. This issue may last for a few minutes or up to several hours before the service will function properly. Many times I have tried to reboot the devices, turn both the router and modem off and on with no improvement in the service.   Live Streams Sun. 6/12 – 10:45am – Attempted to watch church service on Vimeo – Continually buffered and was unable to watch   Sun. 7/2 – 10:45am – Watched church service on Vimeo. Ran fine - only buffered once for a few seconds   Streaming Videos Fri. 7/1 – 7:15pm – Attempted to watch a video on Prime Video.  Extremely pixelated, twice buffered for around 30 seconds then got the ‘Slow Internet Connection on TV’ error.  Stopped watching   Sat. 7/2 – 7:00pm – Attempted to watch a video on Prime Video.  Pixelated and got the “Slow Internet Connection on TV” error as well as 8 different errors before stopped watching.   Download speeds are much slower The data from the small sample of speed tests that I have run with testmy.net, nothing else running on the PC, no other devices, etc. is shown in https://testmy.net/quickstats/kilroy .   Below are the dates and times when the download speeds were recorded in June. The times shown are when first attempting to run testmy.net and when the Hughesnet service was finally operating well enough for the data to be collected.   Tue. 6/7 – 7:00pm to 8:30pm Thu. 6/9 – 9:30am to 1:00pm Fri. 6/10 – 3:30pm to 5:15pm Sat. 6/11 – 9:00am to 2:00pm   The measured download speeds in June were significantly slower than the speeds in May.    Conclusion As stated at the beginning, the overall system performance since the end of May through early July has been as bad as it was prior to the dish being repointed at the end of April. Most of the live and video streams were not able to be viewed and the service stopping and restarting made even typical web browsing and checking of email unavailable at times nearly every day.   The question that needs to be answered is:   When will the overall system performance be back to what it was immediately after the dish was repointed at the end of April and until the end of May?   This has forced me back to asking what I can do to assist HughesNet as this problem is being corrected.   I look forward to your response. ... View more

That would be great if the engineers can have a look.   I have tried editing the format of that message a number of times but to no avail.    Does there happen to be a limit on the length of a post?  The original post had 563 words, the longest I have written, and included a picture of a small table from Excel. I tried using just characters for the table and ended up with 583 words.   Thank you for looking into this. ... View more

Testing with very short message.  Ignore. ... View more

I am available either Tuesday or Thursday next week.  Like last time, the call needs to be as late in the afternoon as possible. ... View more

I have had a lot going on since my dish was repointed and was not able to pass along any observations until now.  I apologize for that.   Live Streams Sun. 5/8 – 10:00AM  Streamed a live church service on YouTube. The stream buffered for several seconds every few minutes throughout the entire time, which was a little over an hour.   FYI: Earlier that morning watched a live stream on Vimeo with no problems.   Streaming Videos We have not had the time to stream many videos, but there were no problems with the ones we watched.   Speed I have been able to collect only a small sample of speed tests that I have run with Testmy.net, nothing else running on the PC, no other devices, etc. The results show that the evening and weekend download speeds have significantly increased over the speeds we had to deal with before repointing the dish.   We still have had the occasional episode of very slow response but not as frequently.   Other than the one problem with the live stream buffering the overall performance is very much improved.   If you would like any additional information let me know. ... View more

I appreciate the second service visit getting scheduled in short order.   The service technician quickly repointed the dish this afternoon.  Shortly afterward basic web browsing and checking of email were working OK but I will record speed tests in the days to come.   For some reason the data tokens were set to zero. Please reset the amount remaining back to yesterday's 36.77GB.   Thank you. ... View more