Review by (hidden by request)
(review was emailed from domain gmail.com)
lodged 125 days ago
 Wendell,Franklin,MA
 Contract price not specified.  "Mild speed improvement from previous hughes net satellite service." "Did not meet the hype promising true high speed service" "Best choice where no other available, otherwise get dsl or cable"
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(ratings match consensus)
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Our experience with Hughes net Gen 4 is that it did not meet the hype,
but was a mild improvement over our previous hughes net plan.
We have no options but satellite and dial-up. No cell, no cable, no
dsl. So the promises of radical speed increases by hughes net with
their new gen4 satellite and excede got me excited. Alas, what we got is
not that different from our previous satellite experience. It's clearly
better (as in faster, and I think a little more reliable as well), but
not dramatically. The reason of course is that latency is just a fact
of life with satellites. The service is sold on raw download speed, but
it's simply not speedy to send a request for a page up to the satellite
back down to the internet backbone and then send the page back. It
sounds sexy, but the speed increase is most felt when downloading files,
which is not the time you most notice the slow speed (ie, surfing the
web). VPN still does not work (because of latency).
So, measured against the expectations of satellite internet, I'm
pleased. Under no circumstances would I recommend it to anybody who had
the option of cable or dsl. Cell . . . It's probably close. My small
mifi experience found them agonizingly slow, but probably a bit faster
than satellite, though not by much.
My experience with hughes net customer service is fair to poor. Level 1
is outsourced to India or the Philippines and they tend to know little
and walk through a script. Fine if you need more simple solutions, but
it doesn't take long to reach the end of their capacity. Escalate and
you are in Texas and my two times with them I wasn't impressed and felt
led astray. It's not awful - they've reset my registration and helped
me out in other ways a number of times, and they are polite and try to
help. This experience is from our previous hughes net experience.
We've now had a gen4 system for about 4 months and only needed to call
customer service once.
Gen 4 measures usage monthly instead of daily. I was afraid of that,
but I find we are doing ok staying in our limit. The monthly limit
actually seems to work better for us than a daily cap. We've actually
be able to download from a higher capacity plan to the bottom of the
line Gen 4 plan, so we are saving money while getting better service.
Not bad.
Comments:
 | | HughesNet Gen4 Like you, we recently switched to Hughesnet Gen 4 and have experienced a modest increase in transfer speed. Whereas before we averaged a download speed of approx 2 Mbs we now average something around 4Mbs with occasional periods as fast as 9Mbs and as slow as 1.5Mbs. Clearly no where near the advertised 15Mbs ever. In addition, even with the top offered plan "Business 400" we usually exceed the 20GB/month limit and must go through the gymnastics to buy "Tokens" that each good for an extra GB. The HughesNet online service has never allowed us to buy these tokens online, reporting that our provider does not offer them. However, a phone call to the HughesNet Tech support (or Marketing), along with the patience to persist through the first several responders who seem to have either no knowledge or actually wrong information, finally results in a helpful person who easily facilitates the transaction.
If any possible broadband alternative exists to satellite ISP, by all means use that. Otherwise, HughesNet serves at a minimal level. | |
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