Satellite > HughesNet Satellite > HughesNet Gen4 Buyer Beware

reply to Sandy T

Re: HughesNet Gen4 Buyer Beware

I'm sure ALL new customers will be thrilled with Gen4, until they start hitting their caps far sooner than expected!

Give it a month or three, and I'm sure the low cap damage complaints will start rolling in!

reply to MeAgain4
No worse than cell phone carriers launching faster speeds on LTE with crappy caps.... Faster speeds only makes you blow thru your cap faster (because you can do more now)...

Not really we have low pings . Sorry sat just sucks soon as you understand that life is good.

reply to grohgreg

reply to MeAgain4

Sorry Greg, I didn't mean that rant to sound directed towards you in any way!!

As for our situation, we were on the Pro plan on the 7000 for about the last 5-6 years. We started on the basic plan, but that didn't last long at all.

We very recently had a hardware failure and was upgraded to Gen4 they said, but they installed a 9000 modem luckily! Huge mistake w/ customer service, I had to do a call review over what was sold to us and what we were billed, ect - and finally get retention to take $100 off the bill. The call review was only in regards to the amount billed vs what we was told, nothing to do with Gen and I'm glad we didn't wait to get it either. They did say still we would get Gen4 with the 9000 modem, but just meaning faster speeds at a future undisclosed date (Doubt it).

Anyway, no back on topic haha! No, we were on the Pro plan on 7000 w/ grandfathered allowance @ 425 daily, and after the upgrade recently we were moved back to the base plan w/ 9000. So yes, now we are unwilling to go back to the Gen4 $80 a month plan. And that is for two reasons, why pay more for less data and tighter restrictions? And, now that we are back on a cheaper plan that offers more than the $80 we were paying with the 7000S it doesn't make sense to go back to $80 a month again (For less allowance)

If we had not just moved to the cheapest plan, and was considering the $80 a month Gen4 plan as an upgrade, then we'd still be concerned about the 30GB monthly limit. Sure we might currently only use that amount or just under, but that is ONLY due to the current constraints. A much faster service provided by Gen4 and the monthly limitation still would not be an upgrade (Aside from hardware as you mentioned). And with faster service, everyone will be using much more than they are currently simply because it would be possible due to faster page loading, easier to actually browse, ect.

So, if the plans were actually more instead of less, we'd upgrade in a minute, even back to the $80 a month plan! I feel in order for Gen4 to be an upgrade, or at least even compete evenly with the current plans, Gen4 without any free time would need to be at least 30GB for the base and 40/45GB for the mid-range plan. currently they are less allowance than what's offered with older hardware and those plans due to the daily limits, rollover, and free period.

Again I apologize, I didn't mean any of that to sound argumentative or directed at you! I was just replying directly to you initially in order to let you know how long we'd been using Hughes.

@ one More Too

I don't really have a complaint with Gen4 no daily rollover, mainly the monthly limit and LOW cap amounts! I only mentioned it due to how the rollover works with older hardware currently, without a monthly limit in place. I do fully understand what you mean about rolling data with Gen4, and you are correct. But the lower overall monthly limits are what concerns me, mainly with no daily amount or daily reset, and MUCH faster service, you could easily burn through your monthly allowance without blinking an eye and then either be limited for weeks at a time, or have to try and limit yourself for weeks at a time in order to not run out. Having to do that, or even worry/think about it, doesn't sound like an upgrade to me at all.

You're right about the amount used daily, we are heavy users and don't always use a full days amount, and don't always use the free period. But we are not a single user household, and we browse heavily all day, so we do often use very close to our limits in the non-free periods on many days a week, especially on the weekends, even without downloading anything just browsing. And watching our total bandwidth with a router I can see how even the middle priced Gen4 plan would be a hindrance for us compared to what we have now with the 9000, or even what we had with the old 7000S

That faster Gen4 speed and monthly limit will immediately catch up to MANY users! I even suspect the light browser like you mention will easily get used to doing more just because of the faster speeds being possible, and would very quickly start having to learn how to limit their usage in order to restrict themselves around the monthly limit.

You guys very well may be right, Gen4 is probably an upgrade for a very light user, but for a family or even a single heavy user I don't see those plans as fitting for anyone like that, especially considering the offered speeds!

I'd be much happier with 5Mbps and much higher caps, but that's just my dream haha! If it wasn't for our recent hardware failure and subsequent forced upgrade to 9000/Gen4? (New contract), we probably would have switched to Excede due to it's Gen4 speeds but nightly free time offering. Now we have to wait out our contract with 9000

reply to Sandy T
I'm getting to think that personal responsibility died in 2008. The number of people that want something for nothing in the last four years is startling. Whatever happened to an understanding of the basic precept: YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR? Some business principles just don't change. In this case, You want more? Pony up !!

//greg//
--
HN7000S - 98cm Prodelin/2w "pure" Osiris - ProPlus - G16/1001H - NOC:GTN - NAT 67.142.115.130 - Gateway 66.82.25.10 - DNS 66.82.4.12 and 66.82.4.8 - Firefox 15/MSIE9 - AV/Firewalled by NIS2012

If I were still a Hughes customer, my interest in moving to a Gen4 system would be based a few other factors. And I expect that the difference will be even greater when comparing complaints from 7000 customers to those from Gen4 customers.

First, Hughes seems to be making it quite clear that their priorities in the future are not going to based on the older Ku sytems. While I'm sure that they will continue to maintain a Ku presence, they continue not to reduce leases on the Ku transponders when their current leases expire. Also, it would appear that, recently, there have been a larger number of complaints from 7000 system customers with regard to connectivity issues, and it may well be the case that maintaining the infrastructure to keep 7000 systems working reliably is not going to be at the same level of priority as will be their efforts in maintaining the Gen4 systems. While I'd think that the 7000 systems will be officially supported for some time to come, even through the last couple of years, the complaints from 7000 users regarding service reliability that show up on boards like this one would seem to far exceed those from 9000 system customers.

Also, after being a Hughes customer for 5 years, I was able to get a WISP connection almost years ago. While speeds are not at the level of those with terrestrial connections, I've had consistent 6 megabit per second down speeds with no limits on bandwidth usage, but the nicest things about the connection, compared to the satellite connection that I had, have been relatively low latency, the ability to use a VOiP phone connection, fast https and ftp connections and transfers. It has been so nice to be able to do banking, paying bills, shopping on-line, etc. without having to deal with the slowdowns that have come with secure satellite connections. Also, with my Hughes connection, it would take me 10-15 to update a single page on my website via ftp transfer. With my WISP connection, I can do the same update in 20 seconds. Thus, I would be looking at how well Gen4 systems can handle https, ftp, etc. and whether they are capable of working with VOiP. If there are improvements in those areas, a move to Gen4 from a 7000 system would be worth it just for those improvements.

reply to Sandy T
Hey, I thought of another question not too long ago.

Do uploads count against your monthly bandwidth on Gen4? Because they don't count against your daily bandwidth (and haven't since 2010-ish) on the HN9000, at the very least.

reply to Doc Lithius
Yes, uploads count sadly. Thus it is slightly annoying having to take that into consideration when you haven't logged how much you do up+down for the last few years.

reply to Doc Lithius

reply to Sandy T
I'll be ditching ViaSat/Exede this coming week because they don't want me as a customer, because I'm the squeaky wheel type that wants their crap to work without me having to constantly unplug, reboot hardware.

Hopefully, Hughesnet will be more reliable in me not having to constantly unplug their hardware to fix software glitches as ViaSat/Exede has. I've had Exede for 6 months and technology wise, it's blazing fast for what I've used it for. I've seen up to 24Mbps down and 4.5Mbps up. But once I was DAPPED after a little over 2 weeks of normal usage, then I had to deal with the twice per day modem recycling to put me back into a highspeed mode during LNFZ. The only problem is, after it did the recycle, it broke DNS/DHCP between the modem and router. I duplicated this with 3 different routers, 2 linksys and 1 $500 Sonicwall TZ100. The only way to fix it was unplug modem and wait 2 minutes and then plug it back in and then refresh the WAN side DHCP on the router, then it worked as it was supposed to.

Anyway, I've been doing some research.. Most cable internet companies only have about 10Gbit connections to a internet backbone. Possibly in larger cities they have up to 50Gbit. So in saying that, with ViaSat-1 and Hughesnet Gen4 having somewhere around 130-150Gbps of total bandwidth each, why are each of them using such low data capping on their subscribers?? Again, cable companies have 10Gbps to 50Gbps and may have multiple connections to the internet and they have up to 50,000+ homes they service and they have data caps at 150GB or more.

Why does ViaSat & Hughesnet market their products with being able to watch movies, videos, video chatting, and other media rich internet content and then give you such low data allowances?? Data allowances have nothing to do with Fair Access. Fair Access should be controlled by QoS metrics which balance out bandwidth for everyone on a beam if congestion is detected.

IS there will be anyone at either one of these companies that can answer my question?? Who at these satellite companies, thought 20-25GB for $110-150 was affordable?? Seriously, who are these people and do they even use their own product??

reply to grohgreg
I'm currently using an HN7000, 1.4mbps & 475mb daily allowance and bucket refill.
I'm seriously considering GEN4, I realize that in theory I won't be able to download as much, but, that's not really an issue.
I've kept a list of my daily uploads and downloads for 5+ years, and I average 6-7 gig down/up per month. I rarely use the free period during the wee hours.
I also get up at 6 am daily, so the first 2 hours on GEN4 would come off my night time allowance.
I don't need 10 mbps, I'd be thrilled to just get 25-50% of that on a regular basis.
I like the monthly cap as opposed to daily, and I'm disciplined enough to monitor my usage and stay out of trouble (no teens using my internet either.....)
So, wish me luck, I'm gonna make the jump *grins*
--
HN7000S 99 West 1250 MHZ Professional Pro Windows 7

reply to TexasRebel
To my understanding (which could be wrong) Viasat and Hughes are not using their satellite's full capacity at this time and not all capacity will be made available for consumer services. They also want to fit a lot more than 50k people per satellite. But even so, I don't think anyone disagrees that the caps are a little low.

Has Hughes launched Gen4 business plans, or are these existing plans supposed to serve businesses as well?