HughesNet Satellite → Hughesnet service plan upgrades

I had to call them and they rolled me over from my old 10/10GB plan to the 10/50GB, same price $59.99, since I'm out of my 2 yr contract, still month to month payment. They would even go to Pro Plus for the extra $20/m with the first 3 free, but we never even use the 10GB.

A friend on Hughes about 20 miles away didn't know so I told him too. He has been experiencing dial up speeds, but I haven't been having any issues, mostly in the 1MB/s range but sometimes drops down but fine for browsing.

Must be because Exede is now offering unlimited midnight to 6am unlimited usage. Glad to see the competition.

Ed-

I enjoy no buffering watching utube vids.I had Wildblue before which is similiar to HN9000 I would think.I buffered many timed.Sunday evenings were impossible with speeds approaching dial-up. I do buffer a bit sometimes, but it's a server problem (high traffic). There is a wifi provider for Mt Ranch (Mobley), his price is more than Gen4, and slower speed 4-5Mbs. I would have to build, maintain a repeater tower, so I went with Gen4. We are supposed to have wifi from the fiber optic cables they laid 5 years ago, they still aren't in service to the towns, repeating towers haven't been erected yet, I don't expect them to be for another 5 years.So much for connecting rural areas of Ca foorhills.Hughes is a better choice, as Exede limits you to 5 Mbs speed, and the same bandwidth allowance . Dish offers Exede in my area, so Hughes was the way to go for me.We don't useup the 10Gbs anytime,10Gbs Bonus allowance in a month, now, although Dish just upped my bill $5 to $70.Mo. so I may look into dropping Dish and going streaming only.We're looking into that.Right now we pay $131/Mo for Gen4 and Dish /200.

Wow, I looked just now and saw the differences seen by address searches for service plans.

Our available plan sucks compared to others. This definately kills the idea of going streaming, and cancelling DishTv.

Hey ecoalex,
Exede is the better option in my area. 12MB download speed and unlimited usage midnight to 5am 10GB monthly limit for $50. I'm paying $59 for Prime Hughes. If it weren't for the $200 equipment fee and lack of their own email service I'd change. There's also a WISP here but it's through a lot of woods for me and most likely won't work although I've talked to some of the installers and they say it may work with a very high antenna (read expensive installation). Our Hughes slows down sometimes on sunday eves, but I think the big traffic is in your area, the West Coast. We're not heavy users, so it's fine for us for now.

I just checked my area, no mention of what the data caps are anywhere on the page, not even the fine print. Did not click on order to see if it was there. Some of my neighbors are getting Hughesnet for some reason, worked with it a fair amount, not much difference in actual performance between them and Exede5. Neither are anything great here (Exede was full for two years, HN is probably over full).

With speeds that low you are going to see data caps as about as pathetic too. Sounds like your location doesn't get serviced by either the new Hughesnet or Viasat birds. So you are stucked with outdated technology on older satellite platforms.

I wouldn't bother if all you can get are Connect plans

Exede offers 5Mbs here (beam 19) west coast, so the same price for slower speeds.I can't complain, my Gen4 keeps getting better.WISP is more $ and slower, plus I'd have to set up a repeater antenna.

alex,
I don't know why you can't get Hughes, looking at the satbeams site »www.satbeams.com/footpri ··· ad=38551 , Echostar 17 beam U19DL is active and the main footprint hits your city just fine, it's centered on Vallejo and the main beam extends to the National Forests. Unless Hughes is just not offering it in your area, I haven't a clue how all this operates. I'm on beam 33 and the only time we have problems is when it snows. Oh, I see you've got gen4, plus dish we don't have dish or TV at all, just internet.

Oh god what a nightmare. So glad I have DSL after looking at that map. Hate to worry about what freaking beam i'm in lol.

Not a subscriber, but know of people who might be. The differences by address are huge. 100 GB on Ultra for $90 vs. 70 GB on Max for $40 more per month, $130 here in Georgia.

Are existing customers going to be able to benefit from this, more to the point the upgraded bonus bytes? My parents still have the 1:1 bonus bytes to their anytime data.

Geez my Exede has been miles better than my parents Gen4. My parents have all sorts of issues with their Gen4. They have constant timeouts and web acceleration errors and slowdowns are unbearable. Even when they aren't Fap'd their speeds are terrible and pages either don't load or timeout.

When they do get Fap'd, thanks to my sibling that can't understand how much of a data hog Tumblr is or how much data the stuff they do online consumes. It's like arguing with a brick wall. A brick wall with a short fuse and hot headed temper lol.

Anyways my Exede has been smooth sailing and the Lnfz is nice which Hughes did away with. Seems Hughes will lose the residential market if they don't upgrade bonus bytes across the board or bring back the lnfz and fix glaring technical issues with their service. Imho they will become irrelevant for the consumer market when a competitor that is newer to the market can offer superior service across the board incl. customer service. This is pointless if Hughes can't open their eyes to compete and offer service comparable to a competitor, they are losing customers. They will lose my parents, they already lost me when I went with Exede rather than sign up with Hughesnet and they will lose more customers if they don't wake up.

Besides excellent service experienced with my Exede system they have awesome customer service. If nothing improves with Hughesnet my parents have said they'll be switching after their contract is up. My Exede system has exhibited none of the problems their Gen4 has and prime time slowdowns are nothing compared to what they experience with their Gen4. Occasionally their system might work fine however it's generally poor speeds, performance with timeouts around the clock. My Exede might hiccup once in a while but usually no problem loading pages, Exede's DAP is also faster than Hughesnet Fap at 500Kbps vs Hughesnet's pitiful sub 56k Fap.

I just want to know if these upgrades will be implemented across the board so my parents can get some actual use out of their system until their contract is up?

Unrelated to the topic at hand but when my parents purchase a 512MB token why does Hughesnet cheat them out of some MB? The 512 megabyte token becomes a 490MB token. It's right after purchase when the token is applied to the account and this happens every time they purchase a token.

Sorry if this post is kind of long.

Loosing customers ?
Hughes claims about one million residential.subscribers.
There isn't a 512 Mb token. There are 500, 1000 and 2000 MB tokens.
Had you read the entire thread you would have picked up on the fact that the "improved " plans are accross the board but the level of improvement varies by location. You would have found links as to where you can check local plan availability.
As to their poor speeds, do they know how to open the modems SCC, have they any errors or conditions ?
Do they know how to enable/disable Web Acceleration or do an MBX Reset ?
These are things all Hughesnet users should know.
Do they know how to take a screenshot ?
A post of their Token Bucket before and after a token purchase posted on the Hughes Community website will get the token issue fixed ASAP.

Tell me about this please: what is it, what does it do, under what circumstances one might reset it. Thanks.

I'm on my tablet so I can't post any pics at the moment.
An MBX Reset, resets the connection to the Hughes Web Acceleration Server.
Very usefull if you have a 30.1.1 error code as an example

Also it can be used in conjunction with enable/disable of the web acceleration "switch" to increment to a different web acceleration server that may be less busy.
More on that procedure another time if you are interested and I have something more in my hand to type on than a Nook.

If read this thread:
»community.myhughesnet.co ··· e-errors
You will find a reply I made to Reggie including some pics that shows how to get to that advanced page in the modems SCC.

Thanks gwalk, I appreciate that. Turns out I leave Web Acceleration off almost always (seems to affect some of my web tracking-blocker tools) so I won't use it.

Yes I know WA improves responsiveness but my connection is so good I just leave it disabled.

You aren't the first to have said the same.
In the coming weeks you may wish to re-evaluate as more capacity is being added and system "tuning" moves forward.
Amazing what a little compitition from Excede will do isn't it.
I remember having 250 MB per day on my DW6000, rather different from my 100 GB per month Ultra plan.

Wow 100GB!? When I bought Frontier DSL up north the salesguy though my bandwidth was 250GB (though iirc he said 250K GB so I'm not sure he knew what he was talking about). As for 250GB I'll believe it if/when I see it...

When I upgraded I bought the Power Plan @$60 i.e. 10GB/10GB and some (many?) months ago they quietly bumped me to 15GB. I didn't ask, they didn't tell. So far these exceed my ability to Download but I guess if I call them I can get upgraded...