[Falconspeed]

Thanks for the warning. You are innocent and made a tiny mistake: contracts are very 2005. No one should be pressures into a contract.

Be thankful. “My monthly bill is roughly $110.0 a month.” Be glad.

My monthly bill is $230 and Verizon is wonderful but expensive. That does not include cell phone.

[ConservativeMind]

A friend had that some 20 years ago and the latency was terrible—something like 200-300 ms. He went to a microwave option until DSL came by.

If you have DSL access, consider getting two drops (installs) out of your wiring. You can bond them together with various routers and get up to twice the performance.

[Equine1952]

You have my heart felt sympathy. I moved out in the country a long way and did the Hughesnet crap. I’ve tried DTV and Dish. They all suck. Now its Roku, sling, fire tv and OAN. Over my stream WiFi data. Little cheaper and most crap I don’t watch anyway.

[Bullish]

But, do you like them?

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

Are you keeping an eye on Elon Musk’s Starlink. It sounds like it might be a viable option.

https://www.starlink.com/

[Laslo Fripp]

Thanks for the warning.

If I weren’t married, I’d cut the cable and save over $2K a year.

TV is a vast wasteland, I never use our house phone and we get 5 bars on the cell service.

[Bob434]

[[HughesNet Satellite Service’s excuse ... “With so many people at home due to the Covid-19 situation, our system is overloaded.”]]

Your response should be- ‘well since you can’t deliver what you promised- how about 2/3 off my bill?’

[Spktyr]

“HughesNet Satellite Internet was sold to me as 10 times faster than DSL service.”

10 times faster than the lowest possible speed DSL sold in the US, the kind that doesn’t meet the former legal definition of broadband.

That would be 64k. So if they give you 640K, they’re still correct - but it’s slower than any DSL sold by a major provider today.

And that’s before you get to the inherent 250ms lag of your download going from surface to orbit and back.

[Wildbill22]

I live far enough out in the middle of nowhere (thank God) that I had to put up with satellite internet for 15 years or so. I also hated it.

I particularly hated how if you used the equivalent of a half hour of Youtube videos, you would have used up your “high speed” for the month, and you had the equivalent of dial up speed. We called it “punishment mode”.

Now I have a radio antenna (microwave?) that is bounced off my neighbors antenna, and down a valley to the server, and speed and quantity is excellent at literally half the cost of satellite. Multiple movies can be watched at the same time. Some day a fiber optic cable will come out here hopefully but I can live with this for now.

[metmom]

We’ve never been inclined towards satellite.

But thanks for the warning. I will pass it on to anyone who is consid it.

[SanchoP]

If you have decent cell phone service use it as a WiFi hotspot. Hughes Net is a scam.

[KevinB]

Sorry for your bad experience, but twenty minutes of research before you signed up would have led you to the conclusion that Hughes is awful. Nobody who has it is happy with it.

[Tennessee Conservative]

We’ve had it since it became available. It’s better than dial-up and really better than nothing when you live so far back in the sticks that it’s all you can get. DSL is at least two years away for us if ever. Not enough people in my area to make it worth bringing it out here. With all the hills around me cell phones don’t even work a lot of the time.

[deadrock]

If you can afford it, I recommend trying a new ISP for a month before canceling your current ISP.

That would mean you would have two Internet connections for a month for the family to test.

For me, that was just over $100 a month in extra cost for the month.

In these difficult times, I can understand if you tell me to 'sod off,' I can't afford that experiment.

[LegendHasIt]

I had it for about ten years, the older technology, (Gen 2, basically) and was generally happy with it.

Until about 7 months ago when my equipment began to fail (although I think their technicians were also sabotaging my connection too). Some days it worked like normal, some days my connection was down for half a day, and sometimes I was down for a day or two.

I struggled along for two months like that, and finally the equipment failed completely, and their tech people refused to commission a new modem.

So, I canceled my service .... Or tried.... They refused to close my account. After two months of billing after the failure I filed a complaint with my credit card carrier, and they did quit paying them and refunded me one month’s payment. They are still demanding payment for the last 6 months I’ve contacted them thirty times via telephone, email, snail mail, their website forum, and online chat, and they still won’t close my account.

[Joe Boucher]

I just paid $400.00 to drop Hugh’s.net
Within ten minutes of getting it I knew Id made a mistake as the service ALWAYS stopped then started then stoped and that would go on regardless of what I’d try to watch.
Real crap service they are.

[gattaca]

Thanks for the warning. My mom lives in the country and has CenturyLink. She was thinking of switching to HughesNet.

[trebb]

I had them when I was "in the boondocks" and had no other viable solution...highest offered speed was 25mbs and data bucket was small enough that streaming TV was out of the question - for about $140/month.

Currently with ATT and have a 50mbs unlimited service for about $90 a month...never had any trouble with it....which actually surprises me.

I guess your plight is one of the reasons so many here 'poll" FReepers before making some decisions.

[Donnafrflorida]

Welcome to the club. I moved in January. No phone support during pandemic. Trying to work from home is a nightmare. 168 a month.

[central_va]

The USA is the only industrialized country that has not extended high speed fiber network out to the exoburbs and rural areas. Yeah were a capitalist country but jeez....

You can get better access to the internet in Kenya than in huge parts of the USA.