Thinking about Hughes?

[Tdog]

I have a friend who has no option for internet but dial-up or satellite. He has Hughes - - and is not at all satisfied. He's even gone so far as to document his lousy connection speeds on a website:

My HughesNet Internet Service

Interesting reading.

Jack

 

[jcaron2]

I have a friend who has no option for internet but dial-up or satellite. He has Hughes - - and is not at all satisfied. He's even gone so far as to document his lousy connection speeds on a website:

My HughesNet Internet Service

Interesting reading.

Jack

When my forced 2-year contract with Hughes ends this October, I'll go back to dial-up before I pay them another dime.

 

[polo1665]

The people who lived in our house before us had Hughesnet and seemed very happy with it. I looked into it thinking it was our only option as well, the price is what floored me. We ended up being able to go with broadband and that has worked out well for us. Cable was also not an option.
I wonder, is Hughes the only provider available for satellite internet? I never researched it any further after finding out we could go with broadband.
Thanks for the link. That connection speed test is pretty neat. Our connection here at work rated five stars. I'll have to use it to check the one at home.

Mark

 

[MossRoad]

We have friends that have this satellite service and are satisfied.
WildBlue: High Speed Internet via Satellite - official website
It might be worth checking out.

 

[thatguy]

Satellite internet and satellite tv both are very similar it seems - haters and lovers for the same company.

My neighbor has Hughes and its OK.. not great, but better than dial up..

As another option - have you considered an 'air card'? You would need to at least cell service..

Brian

 

[chh]

Hughes Stinks! Personally I would rather have dialup than hughes, but I don't have a phone line. I don't have any experience with Wildblue, but I don't think they could be any worse.

 

[Lil_FarmerJim]

Some things to consider about Satellite vs Dial-up internet;

Satellite internet -
1 - Extremely HIGH latency connection caused by the fact it has to travel a few miles up into space and back down.
2 - Depends on a clear view of the sky where the satellite is orbiting
a - This means that if there is clouds the signal is degraded and therfor the performance will be worse than normal
b - in severe weather it will go out do to the density of the clouds and particulate mater.
3 - Limited throughput do to the medium (radio waves), Microwave frequencies only allow a max throughput of ~5Mbps, unless you use some kind of compression acceleration technology. (Thats why for HDTV over sat they have to use MPEG-4 with its high compression ratio)

Dialup -
1 - Limited to a maximum of 56kbps depending on your distance to the Central office and the POP (Point of presence) for the ISP.
2 - Can have high latency depending on how far from the CO and POP.
3- Single user unless you are comfortable setting up some kind of Dial-on-demand router. (Appliance based or Server based)

So no mater what they are both limited in comparison to ground based copper and fiber optic mediums.

Having said all that there are things that can be done to the average users PC to improve the effects seen with such long pipes as satellite provides. I would recommend going to DSLReports.com and finding all the tweaks you can do the to PC's operating system to improve your experience.

As far as Aircards go, they are dependent on the infrastructure in your area, many rural areas still don't have EV-DO style service and therfor are limited to a max throughput of 128Kbps.

 

[Bird]

My neighbor has Hughes and its OK.. not great, but better than dial up..

One of my brothers has Hughes and has the same opinion.

 

[JESSE1]

I had Hughesnet installed back in February. Like everyone else, I had no other choice for internet service except for dialup which was progressively becoming slower. Could not view any pictures and lots of web sites were unreadable with my dialup. I was hesitant to install Hughesnet from the bad reviews I read on this site.
Anyway, my local Hughesnet installer was the same tech who has installed my TV c-band satellite sysem back in the early '90's and also installed my direct tv a few years ago. He is very meticulous in his installations. He spent several hours installing my Hughes system and tweaking the dish. So far I have had very good service out of my system with only a few outages because of bad weather. I think a lot of the problems are coming from a poor install and maybe the older equipment is not as good as the latest Hughes offers. I also have a new Dell HPX 630 computer which may help with the service.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

I've had hughes for many yrs, way better than dial up, but I wish I could get something better, but I can't. It is what it is for those that live where I want to live. My only issue has been hardware, I've had to replace the transmitter on the antenna once because water kept getting into the old one, of course it was out of warrenty. Other than the hardware problem, the service is as advertised.