how-to block ads
|
Review by mrcansell 
UPDATED: 129 days ago
member for 7.9 years, 154 visits, last login: 38 days ago
 Leon,Butler,KS
 Contract price not specified.
 "Better than dial-up, very good installer."
 "Latency annoying at first. Seems slow compared to previous connection."
 "When there's no other broadband available, it's better than dial-up."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Mail,DNS,News:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
|
I had the Hughesnet SOHO package (1.5Mbps/200kbps with .98m dish and 2 watt transmitter) installed about two weeks ago. I moved from the city to a rural area where I can't get cable, DSL, or even ISDN. My only options for broadband are a T1 (starting at $400/mo for 128kbps symmetric) or satellite. After evaluating the options, I went with Hughesnet. It's not the cheapest package out there at $99 per month, and the "Pro Pack" big dish and high power transmitter push the installed cost up even more. I went with the SOHO package not just for the speed, but the FAP is higher (500MB) and the recovery rate is 200kbps, where the residential packages have a 50kbps recovery rate. Installation was about 2 weeks after ordering with a tech who came from the next state. We put the dish on a pole mount on the south side of the house with an unobstructed view of the sky and cabled to the modem at the other end of the house; about 80 cable-feet away. Installation took all afternoon, but some of that was waiting for the concrete to cure before mounting the dish. The supplied Hughesnet 7000S modem provides NAT addresses and used DHCP so a separate router isn't necessary. Using various speed tests I'm getting about 1.5Mbps down but upstream shows up as about 700Kbps; must be an effect of the satellite modems on-the-fly compression. In the last three days we've had an ice storm and a 12 hour blizzard, and the internet worked without issue through it all. Only time will tell if it continues working. Working with my employers SSL remote access isn't a problem, and general web browsing works as advertised; the latency causes pages to lag when clicking a link or shortcut, but then things download fairly quickly. Sometimes it seems slow, but up until last month I had a 6Mbps/768Kbps cable connection so that is to be expected.
UPDATE (August 2008)
After 19 months of service, that started okay and slowly rotted away to barely usable, I'm done with satellite internet. A couple of weeks ago some kind of update was pushed to my satellite modem which made it continuously change acceleration servers, so browsing became a constant stream of "web acceleration outage" notices and working over the connection was impossible.
I recently signed up with Millenicom, using a Sprint ev-do modem connected to an old PC that acts as a gateway server. It may not be as fast as the peak satellite speeds, but it's consistent. I can work from home again; Citrix sessions are no longer an excercise in frustration and my VPN connects. My wife can do almost twice as much work in the same time as she's not constantly waiting on something to make the trip into orbit and back again. Having used ev-do for a while, I wonder how we put up with Hughesnet for so long.
Followup comments:  mrcansell
join:2001-01-08
Leon, KS
 ·Millenicom
 ·HughesNet Satellit..
| Month one - still seems okay I've had this service for a month now. So far it's been good, except for two days recently (12/20-12/21) where I was getting random page load failures. URL's would fail, then work if retried immediately. Removing the "www." from the URL sometimes worked (This same thing would happen when I had Cox Cable's internet service too). This problem passed and the connection is back to normal. I did some reading on the Hughesnet DW7000S modem and found it doesn't have a firewall, so I hooked up my D-Link router between the Hughesnet device and my gigabit network. This means I'm running double-NAT, but this isn't causing a problem with browsing or my work applications, and I feel a lot better being behind an SPI firewall again. Rain fade seems to be a non-issue with the 3' dish; it rained almost all day earlier this week and the internet connection was fine. More than could be said for the TV dish...  | |
| mrcansell
join:2001-01-08
Leon, KS
·Millenicom
·HughesNet Satellit..
| Five months - still working well. So, five months after installation and it's still working for me. After the initial euphoria of "woo, new toys!" I kind of forgot I was on the end of a satellite link. Long ping times sometimes show their influence when loading pages with a lot of small elements, but most of the time everything just works. Some days between 8pm and 11pm I notice a slowdown, to about half rated speeds. While I'd like to be getting the full 1.5Mbps all the time, I've come to accept that being part of a shared infrastructure has it's drawbacks. OTOH, my old cable connection had similar slowdown issues at peak times, and typically would drop over 60% of packets at peak times). I've only lost connection one time; we had five inches of rain in 24 hours (and had a 30 foot wide, 2 foot deep river running through the back yard!  ) and lost internet for a few minutes. TV was also out... too much cloud between me and the satellites I guess. The installation is still rock solid; the 98cm dish on it's pole mount hasn't moved, despite 30mph+ winds hitting it head on, and I haven't had to reset the modem at all.
I see some people have had issues with Hughesnet. Maybe the big dish really makes a difference to the service, or their installer didn't do a good job? | |
| | | |
| Forums » comments on review of HughesNet Satellite Broadband |
|
|
(60)
(34)
(15)