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Review by RegGuheert 
UPDATED: 295 days ago
member for 3.1 years, 269 visits, last login: 59 days ago
 Berryville,Clarke,VA
 Contract price not specified.
 "Stable enough for me to work from home for past 5 years."
 ">700 msec pings, $70/month for a plan limited to 400 MB/day."
 "It's allows me to work from home when nothing else will."
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Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
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Mail,DNS,News:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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I've had HughesNet for four years now. Here are the pros and cons:
Pros:
- High-speed internet out here in the boonies. I certainly couldn't have lived without it, since I work from home and download ~300 MB/day, making dial-up unworkable.
- I've been able to build a nice home network build around my HughesNet connection, giving about 15 devices full access to the internet.
- I've been one of the lucky ones. My connection has been quite reliable over the past four years I have had the service. Here's my belief about why I have been "one of the lucky ones": I have home service that I use for business reasons. What happens is that the transponders that carry home service tend to be empty during the daytime and full in the evenings. The business transponders tend to be full during the daytime and emptier in the evenings. As a result, it's OK for work-from-home except for the ping delays.
Cons:
- >700 msec ping times make working over the VPN *very* painful, but it DOES work.
- No other internet solution costs as much up front as satellite. I paid ~$800 up front and have spent ~$350 over four years on repairs and upgrades. That comes to about $300/year on equipment costs.
- No other internet solution costs as much each month for what you get as satellite. I pay $70/month for a 1 MBps plan that limits me to 400 MB of data during any 24-hour period. (There is a 24-hour punishment at dial-up speeds if exceeded.) However, they do allow unlimited downloads/uploads from 3:00AM to 6:00AM which we can schedule using FlashGet.
- HughesNet tends to put new customers on more available transponders at first so that their early experience is positive. Then they overfill those transponders over time. The result is that conditions for existing customers tend to get worse over time.
The bottom line is that I'll switch to *anything* other than satellite as soon as it becomes available and reliable. I did just get Millenicom Mobile Broadband (reseller for Sprint), but it's not yet stable enough at my house to replace my HughesNet connection. (I'm not within the high-speed coverage area on their maps, but it kinda works here.) Hopefully this will improve over time.
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