Review by flyingrose 
member for 7.7 years, 24 visits, last login: 2.6 years ago
updated 2.7 years ago
 Kaufman,Kaufman,TX
 Contract price not specified.  "Hasn't worked well enough to know if it has any" "Unreliable, slow, 10 hour system outage Sunday; down again Monday" "HN9000 is FAR worse than original Earthlink equipment way back when!"
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(ratings match consensus)
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I do NOT recommend HughesNet for anyone! Even if dial-up is all you can get it is NOT worth the aggravation - and you'll get more done with dial-up! You'll get more work done on dial-up. There is probably an independent wireless company near you but they aren't good at making themselves easy to find. Try the WISP database and Yahoo! Local. Then call 3gstore.com and ask about your cellular wireless options.
UPDATE 05/23/09 It was bad then and is far worse now. I have not been able to do any constructive work for going on two weeks. Every time my connection is throttled there will be many others cussing HughesNet at Twitter. (Just search Twitter for Hughesnet.) Someone finally started a Class Action lawsuit out in California and it looks like there need to be many more.
Contract price $0 down, $20/month for 24 months to pay for the equipment. Up to 1 meg for $59.99/mo. Reseller did NOT mention $125 cash up front extra for installation even though I specifically asked.
I was on the waiting list to get one of the original Earthlink (Hughes satellite) systems way back when. That system worked well even when it rained and in two different physical locations. After two different local wireless companies and DSL I moved again and went with HughesNet HN9000 and so far I truly regret it. Maybe they just don't have the bugs out of the new satellite(s) yet? Or this equipment?
I've had it a little over a week and so far it has never worked right. Tech support doesn't understand speedtests show "normal" (780.20 Kbps to 1.29Mbps) but pages can take 3-5 minutes to load. The third time I called the recording indicated that the HN9000 system was down for all users. Hours later that message was replaced with one indicating a system outage from midnight until 10 a.m. that night. Finally it worked fairly well - until it started gently raining and it went down again.
Tech support now tells me I've hit the "fair usage" limit and will have speeds slower than dial-up (which I confirmed here) for the next 24 hours - unless I would like to get online from 2 a.m. until 6 a.m. Since I don't download movies, video, books, or any other files of that type I didn't expect to run into that limit. I hit it either trying to update from Ubuntu 7.20 to 8.04 or when using ftp to edit a Web site for some friends. Tech support tells me even if I upgrade to the 3 meg option (at $189 a month!) I'll still hit the fair usage issue.
Trying to send this review, the system went down again. Tech support voicemail is again playing this message (which is the same as the one over the weekend): "We are currently experiencing a degradation of service. This degradation is impacting customers using the HN9000 system on a home plan." Degradation = up and down, doesn't load pages, takes 4-5 minutes to load one page, etc.
Anyone have any inside information on whether they're going to get these issues resolved or I need to take the loss ($125 for pole install) and use the money back guarantee and go with local wireless instead? I went with HughesNet because the local wireless company had a two week backlog and HughesNet was offering a $100 rebate plus $0 down up front which made them less expensive.
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