said by gwalk:My guess is that Hughes is not renewing some of the transponders as the leases expire and try to "upgrade" people .
The first part of that is not a guess. They have dropped at least a dozen transponders over the past two years. Among the transponders that they still have they have arranged leases for only partial transponders (symbol rates in the 10-15Msps range) on many others.
For the second part, though, that appears to only occur as an up-sell when people call in with problems. Problems that probably have nothing to do with transponder changes in most cases. For transponder changes, people are transparently changed to others on the same satellite.
On the mobile forums we see a lot of problems due to the changed transponders, for two reasons: One is that folks that travel intermittently and have other service at home may be offline when the transfer occurs (there is usually a window of a couple of weeks during which both old and new are available, then the old is gone). That requires running registration in order to get the new assignment, but the problem is non-obvious to most users.
The other problem is with automatic dishes, which have controllers that need to be set to the same parameters as the modem's assignment. Since people don't notice the change they don't change their controller's configuration, and fail to get online at their next stop.
Both cases are at a minimum weekly support issues in mobile forums, because transponder changes are happening pretty often.
We also get mobile customers who don't go through a VAR but have normal household accounts, who call Hughes support when these problems arise and they come back to us wanting to know how to make their new Gen4 (or in the past, 9000) system become mobile. They are often shocked to learn that they can't.