and here I thought HughesNet was the business venture you have hinted at on Twitter!

So when are you moving to hughesnet??? ;)

If you believe the hype I feel sorry for you. There's a sucker born every minute. Hughesnet or ANY satellite internet is only an option for those with NO other internet option besides dialup. If you've got wireless, I'd stick with it. You will be HIGHLY disappointed with satellite if you intend to do anything except check email and surf a few websites every once in a while. I've been on satellite for >5yrs and it basically sucks most of the time since I work from home and need a Broadband service. Satellite is NOT broadband service no matter what they say. Basically, from 9am - midnight, Hughesnet is so overloaded on their capacity that most customers barely get 100kbps. That's barely better than dialup at 10x the cost. What a bargain. Check the forums, the complaints are running 10:1 against hughesnet for a reason. For every customer that is happy with sattelite, there are 10 that are not happy. Be sure you know what to expect before you spend the big chunk of money to signup.

Mike - I have no plans to change, for sure, and I am well aware of the limitations. I have my wireless service and am happy with it. But for those with no other options, it's valuable to know the HughesNET service is getting the upgrade. I'd hope and anticipate that their service capacity is increasing with the new satellite they recently put into service, too. Satellite will never have the performance characteristics of ground-based communications, but when it's all you've got, it can be (relatively) terrific.

I found your comment surfing for other people's experience with HughesNet, because somebody in the "office of the president" there today tried to convince me that our repeated bad experiences have just been an anamoly. I found several posts from just the last few weeks that tell me our bad experience is common.

Its been a nighmare, from the DirectPC days. We keep the service only as a hot backup because we're in a hurricane prone area and residential DSL service (for the home office) is the last thing AT&T wants to restore (particularly when its provided by a third party that uses them as a common carrier).

Almost every interface with Hughes has been problematic. They outsource their technical support to New Delhi and their billing and payments center to the Philippines. In the global economy, I can live with outsourcing (maybe one day we'll be selling them green energy systems), but they've clearly chosen their outsourcing suppliers on the basis of only one criterion. Cost.

Satellite has serious limitations in its technology for TCP/IP. Latency and bottlenecking being the worst. But there's no reason that you should have to put up with the additional limitation of having it provided by a totally inept company. I don't know if anybody else is better than Hughes (we intend to find out), but I can hardly believe anybody can be worse.

Being an employee of Hughes,I will be the 1st to tell you they overshot their infrastructure big time... They finally launched their newest "spaceway" satellite last august and have began offering base packages of 1 mbps with the lowest latency of all satellites due to the new and improved "on board switching",
meaning they put some of the routing that used to go on in their network operations center, up in space. As far as I can see the systems are actually producing the speeds promised on both the upload and download. Keep in mind this is with the hn9000 modem only, the hn7000 modems are still being offered where line of site issues wont allow installation of the hn9000. This info was asked to be "secret" as to not upset any of hughes existing customers. I would imagine within the next 6 months they will be offering upgrade packages to existing customers, but Im also sure those upgrades will require an additional 24 month commitment not to mention the hn9000 requires a different (harder to install) satellite dish and transmitter that will require installation fees.
I have seen little mention of Wildblue (I work for them also) they offer the same internet services with a little different package options. They started off about 3-4 years ago leasing satelite space from viasat I believe. They sold so well that they overshot their infrastructure within a year and launched "wildblue1" some time ago and since has done a pretty good job of delivering the speeds they promise (although the upload speed seems to drag a bit). Fap rates are refreshed on a 30 day basis. With the base package fap threshold being 7000mb per month and top package at 17,000mb per 30 days, with both companies the fap is presented to employees as a means of protection to customers from super users and gamers who would otherwise find ways to hog bandwidth for their own exploits. A believable scenario, but believe it is more to protect hughes from having to address the issues of overloading their infrastructure (which is more than likely the cause for such drastic bandwidth allotment or fap changes) Hope this clarifies something for someone.

I have had hughes net for 5 years and I am not pleased with it.I was reading about wildblue and I am going to check into it because with hughes net I HATE THE DOWNLOAD POLICY. Do you think wildblue will be any better?

I've had Hughes Net for a couple years and I absolutely hate it, but it's better than dial up - usually, but not always. I do not recommend anyone use Hughes Net and if you read their policy there's all kinds of clauses on the customer being responsible for taking down and returning the satellite dish, upload/download limits (200mb in 24 hours) which are ridiculous - if you watch a few YouTube movies you'll go over real quick. I can not WAIT until something better comes along. If anyone is thinking about Hughes Net and they have other alternatives - go with the other alternative!!!!

Caution!! Watch the Hughes net installer. He (David) ruined my newly refinished floor. He did not install the modem anywhere near my 2 desktops (although I showed him where they were). He apparently started to drill in one spot, covered it up (I found it later) and drilled another. I work from home (very rural area Kingston, GA, and nothing else available). I can't find contact info to complain! The only recourse I know of is to cancel within the thirty days leaving me with no service and holes in the floor. Any ideas?

I fully agree that Hughes is a huge fraud. The speeds are nowhere near what they were advertised to be. Our service goes in and out resulting in us having to call "tech support" about every week and a half for total service outages, and as you all know their support is a JOKE!! Then there's the FAP which is nowhere in the contract we signed. Also apparantly we had hit our download limit 3 times within our first 30 days, and we talked to tech support those 3 times and they did not mention the FAP limits at all, but then immediately after our 30 day period when we called the first thing they mentioned was the FAP. Funny how they don't mention it until after your 30 day evaluation period has passed so you cannot get out of their BS contract without a large penalty. I am filing complaints with the FTC, the BBB, and our AG. This is fraud pure and simple.

I am very interested in a Satellite Internet provider that can actually provide high speed service without problems .....all the comments here seem to put a big negative on Hughes Net. I have DSL ....but it is the slowest you can get (128k) and I am told that is all I can get right now.....and for a long time in the future. I am in Tennessee ......are the problems relevant to where you are located Also, I cannot get a handle on how the FAP will affect me. I am particularly interested in getting involved in Second Life .....and have no idea how much data download that will require on a daily basis. I look forward to any helpful response. Thx, RH

I have satellite internet with hughes and if I had any other option, I would take it. At first it was pretty fast (two years ago), but now it is as slow or slower than dial-up. I live in the country and so far have no other option, but as soon as I do, Hughes is history. I would never recommend them to anyone! It costs me $60 a month too! I'm sure not going to give them more money in the hopes of being a little faster; to make their customers happy they should be boosting the speed at no extra charge.

Can anyone explain why satellite internet doesn't work like satellite TV? Why does satellite TV work super no matter how many people are on it and the internet doesn't? Forgive me for being technologically challenged. Please explain in a way even dummies like me can understand!

Susan: The TV signal is broadcasted to everyone once. Your antenna is simply listening to the signal over the air and decoding it into a TV signal. Everyone can "see" the signal and it doesn't have to be sliced up for each viewer. With the internet service, every user is having a separate and unique "conversation" through the satellite, and it's two-way (I am sending requests up and receiving the results down). So, the capacity of the satellite has to be divided by the number of people using it at any one time.

Think of it like a water hose: TV is sort of equivalent to everyone watching the water come out of the hose and seeing what it looks like. They get the picture on their minds and the need is met. You don't need a unique hose per viewer. However, two-way data (Internet in this case) communication is more like taking the hose and splitting it up to feed the individual needs of many homes. Eventually the capacity of the hose is shared by so many people, the volume of water is reduced per person. In the data world, lower volume per second means less data is flowing - so it's "slower."

Loos analogy, but hopefully it helps. :)

greg

Thanks! I understand. Shouldn't some genius be figuring out some way around that by now?
Susan

Hughes.net Complaints
Company information:
Hughes.net
United States
DO NOT EVER SIGN UP WITH HUGHES NET!!!
They are the worst ever, had them for 5 years and have had to buy something new EVERY YEAR that cost about $1000, “Oh sorry your warranty just ran out”, two years it was a new modem once a new transmitter, was suppose to be a 2 watt, but the installer put in a 1 watt, what a fiasco trying to get that resolved. The installers they send out are just a bunch of bumblef@@ks.(Pardon my French, but its true.) One tech wanted to increase the wire size between the dish and my modem so the web pages could download faster on a bigger wire. Silly me, I fell for it, cost me $600 and I had to pay the tech in cash, for 60 feet of bigger coax, he didn’t give me a receipt. You probably know more than they do, like calling India for customer service, oh did I say customer service?? It does NOT exist in this company. Have consistently gotten DL speeds of less than 60KBPS, for the last 3 months. For $100 a month, we have gotten slower speeds than a dial up modem “oh, we are working with it, no we don’t have authority to switch you to a different transponder, no we don’t have authority to switch to a different satellite” I am about four crappy speed tests from going back to dial-up, it is definitely about ten times faster than Hughes net crappy service. Five years of frustration is just about enough. We had STARBAND for four years before this, they were as bad or even worse. I would LOVE to find someone who would sue the hell out of them. NO they are NOT getting a cancellation fee out of me, our time limit is satisfied.
DON’T EVER BUT HUGHES NET OR STARBAND!!!
If satellite is your only choice, stay with your dial-up service.
Want to sue ‘em, e-mail me sirkinceo@yahoo.com
PLEASE DON’T BUY HUGHES< Everything bad that has been said about them in previous posts it TRUE.
-john
(Update, just ordered dial up service and a modem, will be canceling them this week.Its true, dial-up service is way faster than Hughes net.)

)
If you believe the hype I feel sorry for you. There's a sucker born every minute. Hughesnet or ANY satellite internet is only an option for those with NO other internet option besides dialup. If you've got wireless, I'd stick with it. You will be HIGHLY disappointed with satellite if you intend to do anything except check email and surf a few websites every once in a while. I've been on satellite for >5yrs and it basically sucks most of the time since I work from home and need a Broadband service. Satellite is NOT broadband service no matter what they say. Basically, from 9am - midnight, Hughesnet is so overloaded on their capacity that most customers barely get 100kbps. That's barely better than dialup at 10x the cost. What a bargain. Check the forums, the complaints are running 10:1 against hughesnet for a reason. For every customer that is happy with sattelite, there are 10 that are not happy. Be sure you know what to expect before you spend the big chunk of money to signup.

Just checked to see what everyone had to say about HughesNet and I am thouroughly disheartened by their service, which is no service. I have discontinued service with them on May 07, 2009 but they have billed my credit card for the next month's service plus an early cancellation fee of $241.95. I have contacted my credit card co. but the say they need more information pertaining to date of cancellation, which I documented with case number. What can I do to have these charges removed from my credit card bill? Have any of you had this problem? Please let me hear from you.thanks, Doris.

Hi,

After I've seen the comments on Hughesnet; I am confused weather I should use their services. Since they've mentioned 1 - 5 Mbps speed, I am confused wheather this means 5Mbps up and 5Mbps down link.

I would also like to know weather Hughes makes their own hardware, including Disc, ODU's and IDU's?

Suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Thanks, Sooraj

Hughes SUCKS i have only had it for a few months and for that time it works fine for using the INTERNET MOSTLY other then that they can go F%&K themselfs because when i called the i asked about playing X-box Live and they said and i qoute " our service will work for such activites". Foolishly i belived them and purchased thier service. The very first time i logged into live it Lagged like a bi&@h so i called to file a complaint and they said and i qoute " i am afraid that our provider dose not work for that kind of usage". Bait and switch people BAIT AND SWITCH which is highly ILLEGAL

They got me to ,It burned up stop working they made ne pay over 200 dollers for new system.(they made me figure it out my self how to get it to work and run when they sent me a new system)

They got me to ,It burned up stop working they made ne pay over 200 dollers for new system.(they made me figure it out my self how to get it to work and run when they sent me a new system)

I have never been so disappointed with anything in my life. I absolutely HATE HUGHESNET. I live
in the country and I invested over $300.00 (just equipment) for Hughesnet and it did not work for me. Dial up is faster that HughesNet. When I complainted about the service within 24 hours of installation,( fast downloads, faster emails, SKIPE) HUGHESNET was providing, they told me they could refund me $70.14 back, out of $173.97 (installation and first month payment) they had drafted from my account. There should be something the consumer could do about this outlandish business. If it doesn't work, you should be refunded if you are still within your 30 day trial.


DIRECT TV...you better get away from HughesNet or it will ruin your business. I'm already
looking to change my TV service, because of it.

I assumed a HughesNet contract from the prior owner of a home that I purchased. BIG MISTAKE. It's hard to know where to begin with how rotten an experience it has been.

No phone call to them (no matter how minor) can be completed in less than 25 minutes. I don't know where they outsource to but they have clearly chosen to select the lowest cost company. They will repeat "Thank you, [Mr. or Ms. your name here]" at least 45 times in every call, all the while that they are telling your incomprehensible garbage. The explanations of everything are very, very hazy.

To do anything, you must pay your current bill, even if it isn't due for three weeks. (That just happened to me.) I can hear them licking their chops as they demand your credit card number to do anything.

When you call back about an issue that was obviously screwed up (to their financial benefit, no other way that things get screwed up), they will flat out lie to you. They give you these long confirmation numbers that mean nothing because they don't keep any records that will ever, ever help you. Those records only say what helps HughesNet get your money.

The actual online service stinks at every hour of the day. But during business hours, it is virtually non-existent. You might as well do everything between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. If you try to accomplish anything between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., it is nothing but frustrating.

If I could break the contract at no cost, I would do so today. Instead, I am stuck with another 14 months of this nonsense. Please, please do not make the same mistake that I did. Get anything else that's available. You will be very, very sorry if you sign a contract with HughesNet. I can't wait until I can take the dish down and put it out for the scrap hauler. Bye, bye!!!!

I have been having slow speed issues as well as not being able to download large files. I tried to update my TomTom map recently only to find that it simply would not download a 767 meg file. Is this an impossible task on Hughes net?

10/10/2009 14:31:54 17.1
10/10/2009 14:23:48 18.4
10/10/2009 14:19:00 25.4
10/10/2009 14:13:57 51.6
10/10/2009 13:46:22 117.2
10/10/2009 13:40:36 16.3
10/10/2009 13:38:43 18.4
10/10/2009 13:36:58 22.2
10/10/2009 13:36:27 26.5
10/10/2009 13:29:11 5.6
10/10/2009 13:27:17 15.5
10/10/2009 13:26:34 75.9
10/10/2009 13:23:15 7.6
10/10/2009 13:11:21 22.5
10/10/2009 13:01:13 11.4
10/10/2009 12:59:56 67.3
10/10/2009 12:57:42 26.5
10/10/2009 12:54:47 32.1
10/10/2009 12:53:45
........the last # denotes performance ability 12 being the highest for a viable connection to the internet....this has been quite common for the last year, to cancel they demand $400....I have pro plus planat $85 per month and have had more than 100 service calls to them in the last 13 months

I have had HughesNet for 6 months and hate it!!!!!!!!!!!
Even if you dont have any other options dont get HughesNet, your better off with nothing; at least you save yourself the horrible experiance and can be free of the continual frustration.
I will probably cancel and pay the $400.00 cancelation fee just to be free of this experiance.
What problems have I had with HugesNet? No reason to waist my time re-typing every comment listed above and all over the WEB, its all TRUE so stay away from HughesNet! IF YOU HAVE NO OTHER OPTION "DO WITHOUT"
As long as people read these comments and continue to purchase HughesNet then nothing will change.
DONT, DONT, DONT go with HughesNet!