HughesNet Promises Service Improvements

HughesNet employees are the most arrogant bunch of jerks I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with. They know you have nowhere else to go and they behave accordingly. The two years that I had to deal with them (and their predecessor Skycasters) rank the worst memories of my IT career. Service that went out on overcast days, service that was slower than my 1X cell phone, idiot technicians, blah, blah, blah. My favorite memory is of the "Level 3" tech named Todd that told us to turn our equipment off for 24 hours because it "needs to rest."

When we finally ditched the SOBs in favor of a bonded T1 that cost twice as much they tried to bend us over on our e-mail addresses. They wanted $90 to maintain our skycasters.net e-mail addresses for ONE MONTH so we could transition our contacts to our new e-mail. Our fault for using their e-mail service (mind you that decision was made before I worked here) but still, $90 for 25 lousy e-mail addresses? I could find a hosting service that would give me thousands of e-mail accounts for that price.

I'd suffer dial-up before I'd ever again deal with HughesNet. I'm not a big fan of Verizon's business practices and I loathe AT&T but I'd love nothing more than to see them drive HughesNet out of business.

Your post shows a lack of understanding.

You apparently had Skycasters as a VAR (reseller) of Hughes and somehow thought the two were the same, or that one followed the other. Not true on either account.

As far as ownership goes, Skycasters is still Skycasters, but Hughes is now a division of Echostar. They are slowly moving tech support back onshore from India, with a new call center in Texas. They have improved caps and speeds, and there is good reason to believe that their Gen4 service will exceed Exede (pun intended).

Under prior ownership they canned anybody caught posting in public. Now they have 10 employees posting on their own forums, and the most knowledgable of those 10 also posts here (less so since they have their own, but I can attest that he quickly responds to PMs here).

Nobody knowledgeable would ever suggest that someone choose satellite when terrestrial broadband is available, but if Hughes had never implemented consumer satellite (something considered impossible, in economic terms, in the 90s when they did it) the folks in the boonies would still be stuck with dialup, and often not 56K dialup either.
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Motosat self-pointing dishes: 1.2-meter XF-3 on 127W, .74 meter G74 on 127W, SL-5 HD DirecTV|idirect 3100|Hughes HN7000S|Verizon UMW190 Air Card|1990 Blue Bird Wanderlodge Bus "Blue Thunder"|Author of hnFAP-Alert, PC-OPI and DSSatTool

My clueless tech support ("Let it rest.") agent was in the United States. I never had to talk to India when getting support through them, which just goes to show you that outsourced tech support agents do not have the monopoly on stupidity and ineffectiveness.

I have no idea of the distinction between Skycasters or Hughes, nor do I care. All I know is the service was installed from Skycasters and had converted to Hughes before we ditched them for good.

No exaggeration when I said I'd rather deal with dialup than the people at Hughes. My employer was willing to double our internet bill rather than continue to put up with their nonsense. LTE is going to be the nail in their coffin and it can't come a moment too soon.

You have what is called a "parochial view" meaning that you think that what happens in one area is true everywhere. I have a different perspective, having used internet sources in 48 states (I'm missing Delaware and Hawaii) and three Canadian provinces in the past couple of years. I can state with certainty that AFTER the big guys finish their LTE rollout in a couple of years that there will still be 10s of thousands of square miles in this country with no cellular signal of any kind. It won't all be in the open areas of the West, either. You need to really spend some time in the hollows of West Virginia and the Carolinas, to name only one example.

You paid Skycasters and had Hughes service, so you think they are the same. The next time you buy a Sony TV from Best Buy try convincing either of those companies that they are the same, or even related. Skycasters provided US support, which is why you paid more per month than someone with the same service directly from Hughes. I am VERY familiar with that particular relationship; I'm not talking in hypothetics.
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Motosat self-pointing dishes: 1.2-meter XF-3 on 127W, .74 meter G74 on 127W, SL-5 HD DirecTV|idirect 3100|Hughes HN7000S|Verizon UMW190 Air Card|1990 Blue Bird Wanderlodge Bus "Blue Thunder"|Author of hnFAP-Alert, PC-OPI and DSSatTool

Nothing you have said has answered their concerns of poor service and indifferent customer service; which is clearly due to the fact that they are almost a pure monopoly.

This is just a classic case of profit over the American people.

In many places, telcos and cable companies have monopolies. In the case of satellite, it is just the opposite. Other than possible line-of-sight restrictions, just about everybody in the US has a choice between three unrelated satellite companies. Those companies offer completely different packages, each with completely different data limitations. You can have daily, weekly, or monthly limits in a wide variety of choices.

Now please, explain how this is a pure monopoly?

Oh, and also explain the profit part, but before you do, please research SEC filings of satellite companies, since they might enlighten you just a wee teeny bit. I mentioned that it was considered impossible to do what Hughes did when they introduced satellite internet, and the cumulative losses posted by all three players over much of their existence is more likely to make you wonder how/why they stay in business.
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Motosat self-pointing dishes: 1.2-meter XF-3 on 127W, .74 meter G74 on 127W, SL-5 HD DirecTV|idirect 3100|Hughes HN7000S|Verizon UMW190 Air Card|1990 Blue Bird Wanderlodge Bus "Blue Thunder"|Author of hnFAP-Alert, PC-OPI and DSSatTool

..is the only way to get customers. Giving your customers 15mbps with a 500mb daily bucket kinda makes the entire service worthless. That, plus the latency..

..now, if they bumped it to, say, 250Gb/month, I'd be interested. That is what some cable providers have been doing lately.

Not really.

In some places, SBroadband is the ONLY option (literally, no DSL or cable)

As long as there are rural areas that dont have reasonable cell phone speeds, they dont need to change the business model at all.

Free market, yay!!

Not just there caps are an issue, there entire business model is absurd compared to ground based systems. I recently read and article ( in the evening link on BBR) where the author was claiming that satellite boradband on the new VIAsat satellite will highly complete with "wireline" broadband from cable and dsl in all aspects.. I had to laugh. I quickly posted a rebuttal and asked the author to retract his story as he in no way did his research.
Honestly once broadband satellite offers atleast 5GB per day of at least 5-6 mbps then a throttle after that ( essentially meaning 150GB per mth) and that offering is under $50 per month then they will complete with wireline services. This does not even take into account the latency issue that will still be a major drawback for most.

However IMHO By the time satellite broadband offers this kind of plan, cellular broadband providers will be offering LTE or even HSPA+ packages of 200GB for $20.

Satellite sucks, pure and simple!

As a rural Internet user, I would rather use my crappy 3G Mifi device, or dial up, over slow, expensive and heavily capped Satellite "Broadband"... more like "Crippleband".

Yea wonderful , LTE that you have to pay through the nose for even a crappy bandwidth cap of 5GB a month. Right now its $80 a month for 12GB of data , go over that and you get charged another $80. Yes you do get FAR better pings and for gaming you simply won't have a choice but otherwise it just sucks.

LTE is not the solution when it is hardly a fraction of even DSL's average bandwidth cap. Landlines are still the best way to deal with the problem. Until all these insane providers stop getting away with charging whatever they want for 4G networks then it simply isn't worth it.

From the republic of Georgia, I Skype with my parents with them using Excede. They pay $80 for 17gb which is cheaper than Verizon's 10gb for $80.

Latencies still suck though. :P

lose FAP, *yawn*

There is only one simple way on how to decrease the latency but its too far risky and dangerous (by HughesNet turning up the frequency).
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HN7000S/ 1 watt/ pro plus edition/ 4 pc's on a D-Link wired router/ 1-2 pc's on wireless D-Link router with password

LOL at the guy who's used internet providers in 48 states or whatever... RIGHT, I'm sure they were for extended periods of time too right? Say 1 to 2 years of said service in each state? How old are you? 89? You can't judge an internet provider after a day or even a month of service, no more than you can expect the user you were being such a prick to, to know if hughsnet sucks everywhere or not. If you do a google search for hughsnet the only positive reviews you find are surprisingly well written and sound amazingly similar to their commercials. Just because there are more than one satellite company doesn't mean the user has access to more than one satellite company. DUH DERP DE DERP SHITFACE. How is that hard for you to understand? He was plainly and clearly stating the FACT that satellite companies like hughsnet not only have a monopoly but THEY KNOW IT. Over the last few months the problems I've been having are just like the rest of their pissed off customers on their forums. Intermittent turbopage failures, dial-up connection speeds, and ignorant, arrogant, script reading MORONS for tech support. And even tho I am able to download from SOME sites (Mostly over seas sites I noticed) at 50 to 80k a second, the tech support idiot had the nerve to tell me I have a transmitter issue and they are going to charge me 120 bucks to come fix it. Wow... for a busted transmitter it sure works pretty F*ING good when connecting to certain overseas servers huh? I was so pissed off at the idea of having to pay 120 bucks, about two months worth of what they charge, I politely told her I would be ripping down the god damn dish off the roof of my house, taking a dump on it, and sending it to their corp HQ b4 I pay 120 bucks more for shit service that I haven't been receiving for the last month or two in the 1st place.

If anything THEY OWE ME 120 bucks. How dare they charge 120 bucks (In addition to monthly fees I've paid for services not provided) for me to be a customer. They obviously don't want my patronage. Correction, they know I have very few choices, either them, wireless (Doubt it will work in this house) or dialup. Time to switch I guess. I love how there have been a rash of users complaining for the exact same problem I am having and they try to give me this "Oh it's a problem on your end" BS, especially when every fabric of my being as a tech with 20 years experience tells me my equipment isn't broken if I can connect to one website, but not another, and funny enough that webpage bypasses turbopage by using an alternate port, and I had turbopage problems, but they don't want to listen to experienced users. They have a stupid script, and they shall not deviate from said script. It is always the users fault, their equipment on their end is obviously more perfect than god himself.

Anyone who tries to defend these selfish scam artists are either so lucky they need to go buy a mega millions lotto ticket RIGHT NOW, or they are a paid hughsnet spokesperson, or they are just a contradictory asshole who's used the internet in 48 states here and there so he obviously knows everything about every satellite company available. Far more than people with 1 or 2 years experience with THE ONE THEY ARE DISPLEASED with. God damn COMCAST or WOWWAY never charged to send a tech out to fix their equipment, when I lived in the city... because they actually want to keep customers I guess, and they know I can switch to either company if I want.