If you have Hughesnet.....Have you been put on notice?

doxford jim · Mar 22, 2013

Hughesnet is somehow connected with Xplornet Communications Inc.
I live in Canada and used to be an Xplornet customer but no more. Interestingly enough, when I started to do an internet search on Xplornet customer complaints I found this website below

XplornetSUCKS - Powered by vBulletin

This site is well worth a look at. Xplornet has serious customer service problems and doesn't seem to care as long as they can keep drawing money out of your bank account. Oh, and they are dumb enough to try and bully, threaten, intimidate, harass their customers as well as use fraud and extortion to get what they want (do what we want or we will ruin your credit!!!!!). I know, I just had to go after Xplornet using government agencies and Xplornet soon backed down and apologized.

I would caution about getting into any new deals with Xplornet/Hughesnet as they have shown to untrustworthy and dishonest.

Each to his own I guess.
Jim

grsthegreat · Mar 22, 2013

check around ... i didnt even know what microwave internet was until a neighbor told me about it. Most places that have a line of sight to a high mountain range may have the system in-place and dont know it.

i have a 8" x 8" dish on my roof pointed to the mountain top about 20 miles away. theres a dish up there that transmits the signal to my dish. its fiber optic from the city to their antenna array.

very nice, fast and reliable network. and $69/month with unlimited access.

crazyal · Mar 22, 2013

TripleR said:
Most of us who use Excede or HughesNet have no other alternatives. We have only occasional cell signals and then only in certain places in our house which seems to move every day. The hills keep us away from using the service my brothers have out in the flatlands.

That was the case when I first moved in. The power was closer than the phone line so I never ran one to the house as we had OK cell phone service. But DSL and cable were not even available so it was Wild Blue or HugesNet. Being in the mountains most signals don't go far so I was surprised when Verizon (which had no service at the house) installed a new tower that's less than a mile away. At times it felt really frustrating having only the sat options for internet. Now I can get DSL if I put in a phone line or wireless like I now have.

TripleR · Mar 22, 2013

crazyal said:
That was the case when I first moved in. The power was closer than the phone line so I never ran one to the house as we had OK cell phone service. But DSL and cable were not even available so it was Wild Blue or HugesNet. Being in the mountains most signals don't go far so I was surprised when Verizon (which had no service at the house) installed a new tower that's less than a mile away. At times it felt really frustrating having only the sat options for internet. Now I can get DSL if I put in a phone line or wireless like I now have.

We were just the opposite as when we built our house almost twenty years ago Charter had their tower up in the hills past our house and the line to town ran right in front of our house. The family who owned the land before we bought it had flagged down one of the trucks when they were installing it and worked out an arrangement to get his trailer hooked up with a service spot put where they hadn't intended to.

Several years later, they moved the tower as they no longer needed it on a hill and stopped servicing the line by our house, so we were out Internet and TV. We then put in satellite TV and Hughes after checking on everything else.

The company that does satellite TV does Hughes, Wildblue, the radio type, line of sight and everything else except cellular phones and no one in my area has decent cell service. We are surrounded on three sides by hills and the cell towers and everything else just happens to be in the wrong direction for us to get service. My son is one miles out of town and gets DSL, we are two miles out and it's not available. We got an antennae from Wilson and it doesn't help. We have tried literally everything.

As I said earlier, we get good service from HughesNet, but they are expensive and when it rains or snow gets on the receiver...

JBourquin · Mar 22, 2013

When I moved into my new house I tried to have my DSL service transferred from my old house. Got a call from Frontier telling me the new place was too far off the grid to get DSL(6.7 miles from closest server). So, I started looking into Satellite internet. Frontier apparently has a contract with HughesNet so I figured I'd give it a try. The guy came out to install the dish and due to a barn being in direct line of sight the HughesNet dish could not be installed on the same telephone pole my Dish Network one was one. I refused to pay $100 to have them install another pole in my yard, he didn't have the right tools to do it anyway. It was then that he informed me that there was a DSL sub station only about 2 miles down the road from me to the south, but the wire was not run far enough up my road for me to get service. He said he was gonna make some calls and see what he could do then call me back that afternoon. I didn't hear from him for over 2 wks and got tired of spending >$70/mo for telephone only so I called and cancelled that too(we all have cell phones anyway). Well, here it is about a month later and my wife sends me a text when she got home from work yesterday. Apparently there was a note on my door from the installer stating they ran the phone wire the rest of the way up to my house... Oops! Guess I'll be looking back into it again..

teejk · Mar 22, 2013

I'm being pounded by HughesNet to upgrade (I think the current Hughes "bird" is dying). Verizon has a tower 3 miles away and we have been very happy with our Verizon cell-phone service.

Quite frankly we are getting tired of having to scrape any bit of snow/ice off that Hughes dish because it was placed in a spot that worked without getting a chainsaw out but I'm afraid somebody is going to get hurt crawling out that upstairs window. After some long outage periods recently I did call them to see if it was us or them and they told me I had a "pointing error" that would cost $130 to adjust.

So I'm asking about what is involved with a cell modem. Currently Hughes comes into the house to a Motorola cable modem that feeds a Linksys wireless router.

I understand that Gen4 moves to a monthly allowance like the wireless plans do. That is a plus I think since some days we use all, some days we hardly use anything. As far as I can figure out, Hughes still has that overnight download window so that would be a plus.

kco · Mar 22, 2013

teejk said:
I'm being pounded by HughesNet to upgrade (I think the current Hughes "bird" is dying). Verizon has a tower 3 miles away and we have been very happy with our Verizon cell-phone service.

Quite frankly we are getting tired of having to scrape any bit of snow/ice off that Hughes dish because it was placed in a spot that worked without getting a chainsaw out but I'm afraid somebody is going to get hurt crawling out that upstairs window. After some long outage periods recently I did call them to see if it was us or them and they told me I had a "pointing error" that would cost $130 to adjust.

So I'm asking about what is involved with a cell modem. Currently Hughes comes into the house to a Motorola cable modem that feeds a Linksys wireless router.

I understand that Gen4 moves to a monthly allowance like the wireless plans do. That is a plus I think since some days we use all, some days we hardly use anything. As far as I can figure out, Hughes still has that overnight download window so that would be a plus.

I'm with Bell Canada, but I imagine US companies use similar equipment. My setup was simple with the Bell Netgear MVBR1210C TurboHub. The unit includes the cell modem plus wireless/4 port router very similar to the Netgear WNDR3700 router I already was using. So all I really needed was the Bell router. It can even be setup as a DHCP server.

The wireless on my old WNDR3700 is better than the Bell router so I connected it to the new Bell router via ethernet and disabled the Bell wireless. I can turn the Bell wireless on if I want and use it as a 2nd access point.

Bell has other offerings but they all include the modem and wireless router. I like the Netgear hub because it connects to the rest of my wired network.

The other advantage is the Netgear MVBR1210C has a connection for an external cellular antenna, and I added that to improve my signal quality (I'm 23 km from the tower).

rekees4300 · Mar 22, 2013

teejk said:
So I'm asking about what is involved with a cell modem. Currently Hughes comes into the house to a Motorola cable modem that feeds a Linksys wireless router.

Verizon vs. Hughesnet is a no-brainer if you are in Verizon's 4G coverage area. Check their coverage map. If you are covered then sign-up for Millenicom's 3G/4G Hotspot Plan. It's $70/mo., no contract, 20GB/mo. limit. Their plan includes the 4620LE Mifi Jetpack which is a modem/router combo. Millenicom is a reseller of the Verizon service so they use the same infra-structure (aka towers).

Verizon Wireless Coverage Map | Verizon Wireless
Millenicom | High Speed Wireless Broadband
Millenicom forum | DSLReports.com, ISP Information

General Lee · Mar 29, 2013

deerseeker001 said:
we got the gen4 upgrade best thing we ever did,works twice as fast,no daily download allowance-goes by monthly allowance.win-win situation.

I decided to upgrade to Gen 4. Seems faster but I haven't run it through its paces yet. I was told by their employee(s) that the unlimited download allowance in the middle of the night was no longer available. But when you go to their system control page, their is an allowance gauge for the "Unlimited" bonus bytes.

Can you advise on this. Not sure if your up that late (2am-8am) to test for unlimited usage?