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Review by birdonawire 
UPDATED: 111 days ago
member for 7.3 years, 23 visits, last login: 79 days ago
 Delaware,Delaware,OH
 Contract price not specified.
 "Fast, reliable"
 "Speeds can vary greatly"
 "Reliable and fast when other choices limited"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Mail,DNS,News:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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HNS, the good and the bad: Caveat emptor
This is an update to my earlier review. Hopefully, it can help you make an INFORMED decision on whether to jump onto HughesNET or any other satellite-based provider.
We currently have the HughesNet DW7000 system on the Pro+ plan. We started with the Home plan but wanted the increase in both upload and download speeds. It wasn’t a bad increase for just $10 more a month (it jumped us from $69 a month to $79 a month). We have the usual issues with the service but I knew what we were getting into. Anyone who has been in the military and worked with satellite communications knows that you can transmit data EXTREMELY fast over satellite, at speeds that can blow copper-based connections away by an order of magnitude, even with latency. BUT, military applications aren’t sharing space with 20 million civilian users. The fact of the matter is that any bird up there does have limited capacity. You can only share transponders between so many people before you start to have problems, not just on the satellite but with the shared terrestrial connections as well. Remember, it IS a shared connection. Realistically, the only way to mitigate the problem would be for HNS to put more birds into orbit and increase terrestrial capacity at their NOCs. That, however, would be a very expensive alternative and they’d no doubt pass along the cost to us, as customers.
We jumped onto the Direcway service several years ago because we live out in the boonies and there is no alternative other than dial-up. We struggled with dial-up for a while but only one person can be online at a time and our connection speeds ran between 19k and 26k when we were lucky, and our connection would drop every 5-15 minutes. So we ordered Direcway service (which later became Hughesnet) and have been happy with it, given that we’ve had to live with the limitations of the technology. We actually started out with the original "grey dish" one-way DirecPC product yeeears ago and upgraded to the 2-way when it became available, also many years ago. The cost is a real pain but the service has been very reliable. On the Pro+ plan, we do get download speeds almost precisely 1.5mb (as advertised) by mid-to-late evening but upload speed is NOWHERE the advertised 300k. It’s more like about 30-60k on a good day. Our download speeds actually exceed the advertised tier speeds somewhat if you’re up and using the service around 1am through about 5am. We tried using Vonage with our HNS service and the “receive” portion of the service worked very well. We could hear the calling person with crystal clarity. The problem is that the upload speed is so slow that the person at the other end said we sounded very choppy, and you had about a two-to-four second delay for each end of the conversation, making fluid conversation impossible. Fortunately, we cancelled the Vonage service within our trial time and got our money back. But the point is that we did try it and I guarantee it won’t work, at least with Pro+ speed. Perhaps with the business-level speeds? I work for Embarq (the telephone company formerly known as Sprint) and at times work from home, so I connect to our enterprise network from home using VPN over the satellite and it does work, although veeeeeery slowly. Again, it is just a trade-off you make when you need the connection. When we moved to our new house, even further out into the boonies, I called to have a local installer move the dish but rather than wait for them, I spoke to a supervisor there and was cleared to move the dish myself. Having years of experience aiming two-way vsat equipment, this was no big deal. I sunk a mast into the ground, dug a trench to bury the cable running to the house and had the dish pointed and everything running very quickly. I had the dish itself locked on its bird again within a few minutes. One nice thing about the HNS equipment is that the dish will NOT lock onto anything but the correct network. With your pointing equipment (if you have it), you can see other birds but the dish won’t lock onto anything but the correct one. In addition, with the dish in “pointing” mode it will NOT transmit (“pointing” mode disables the transmitter), so there’s no danger of being irradiated by its transmitter being inches from your head.
Bottom line folks is that yes, HNS’ service (or any other satellite Internet service) isn’t perfect and it’s sure not as cheap as cable or DSL. The FAP is a huge headache, especially now that they’ve changed how it works (it used to “recover” within 5-8 hours but now you have to wait a full 24 hours once you hit the FAP, as of April 2007). Bear in mind if you control your downloads so you don't hit the FAP threshhold, you can wait for your "bucket" to refill some and then keep working, but if you are unlucky enough to keep going and actually trigger the FAP, you will be knocked down to about 56k modem-speed for a flat-24 hour recovery time. Weather and latency are ever-present issues. VPN clients are painfully slow over the service. VOIP service is a no-go, at least with Pro+ speeds. It isn’t the download speed that kills it but the upload speeds and the latency. It’s a little weird to try to talk to someone with a two-to-4 second delay built into the mix. But then, you have to remember that your data is traveling about 44,000 miles round-trip between you, the bird, and the terrestrial network (the NOC), and then it has to route through Hughes’ GSP and then the Internet itself. When you think about it, it’s amazing that it’s as fast as it is considering how far your data traverses between you and where it’s going, and all points in between. There is plenty of information out here on DSLReports and you can read both the good and the bad with HNS or other satellite providers. Take the time to educate yourself about them and the technology being used before you make the jump. I guarantee you those of us who have satellite are using it for ONE reason: We have no other alternative for broadband or broadband-like service. We sure don’t jump onto this service for how cost-effective it is! The service does work, although you will not get advertised-speeds until late in the evening through the wee hours of the morning. Heavy weather will temporarily shut down your connection. VPN’s work slowly it. VOIP is virtually unusable on it (due to latency and upload speed issues). The equipment is expensive. The monthly cost is fairly high. The FAP truly sucks. Be prepared to be your own tech-support, but if you do have to call their tech support be prepared to come away from the call very angry and frustrated. ALL of this is just a fact of life when dealing with satellite Internet, with Hughes and probably with any other providers (Starband and Wildblue). Jump into this as a well-informed consumer. Remember: Caveat emptor.
If DSL or cable ever make their way out to us, we’ll gladly jump to either one. But at present, there is no real hope either ever will and that leaves us with one option: satellite. So until then, we’ll just live with what we CAN get, given the limitations (which ARE frustrating and aggravating), and hope HNS doesn’t keep jacking up the price on us.
Oh, and what people say about HNS tech support is very true. I personally wouldn’t advise bothering to call them unless you really are in the mood for serious aggravation. You will speak to someone whose grasp of English is tenuous at best and reads from a script, so their actual problem-solving skills are limited to what’s on that script. I guess we’re lucky! I’m familiar with the technology and can fix our periodic problems myself. But having spoken to HNS support a time or two in the past, I agree with what others have said about the train wreck their “support” really is. They are nice enough sounding people but dumb as a box of hammers and obviously have limited-to-no grasp of the product/service they are supposed to be supporting.
2 March, 2009 UPDATE
We received an email from Hughes telling us we have to upgrade our DW7000 modem to the newer HN7000S (presumably to support the newer DVB-S2 gateways). We went ahead and put in our order for the free upgrade. We have been month-to-month for a looooong time now and this "free" upgrade started the clock running on a new 24 month service agreement, but we weren't planning on jumping ship anyway since we cannot get anything else where we live. I've been reading not only on this forum but other forums on the Internet where DW7000-to-HN7000 modem upgrades have been done, as a means of getting a feel for what to expect. Seems that some people have had very good luck while others have had no luck at all. Our DW7000 modem has always performed like a champ and we've always gotten our advertised up and down speeds, and even better in the middle of the night, so I guess we'll see if the new HN7000S modem performs at least as well. If it does, I'll be happy. If it performs BETTER than the DW7000 then I'll be ecstatic....but I'll reserve judgement and celebration until then. I'm just reluctant to fix what isn't broken. But......considering it sounds like we could experience service interruptions, guess it's time for the upgrade. What I'd really like to do is an upgrade to the HN9000, but that'll mean a complete upgrade in equipment as well...which means more $$$!!!!
UPDATE: March 7, 2009
We received the HN7000S sat terminal and I set about doing the swap-out. Everything is working fine now but there were a couple of "gotchas" that you should know about. First, the manual for the upgrade that comes with the HN7000S terminal won't help you much. Also, you WILL have to call tech support to actually do the swap. The DW7000-to-HN7000S is not a simple "unplug the old and plug in the new" kind of operation. In short, it won't work. Here's the skinny:
When I connected the HN7000S terminal and powered it on, the LAN light was on solid (of course) and the power light would just blink. Turns out that is normal because it indicates the terminal is working on just factory settings. In order to actually do your swap the terminal has to see the satellite so it can send and receive configuration information. The problem is that it can't send and receive the data it needs to configure itself if it can't see the satellite in order to send and receive that data. Interesting catch-22 there! I instantly knew a call to Bangalore, India was in my future. As it turned out, the tech support guy was actually helpful and he had me up and working within about 5 or so minutes. Firstly, he informed me that the activation CD that comes with the HN7000S terminals is no good. Also, the "Start Registration" link that you'll see when you bring up the terminal's control-center screen is no good because it's the same version of the software on the CD.....which is why you'll have to call tech support. He walked me through the Satellite-Installer config screens on the terminal and gave me a plethora of params that were required to manually configure everything. These included frequency, DVB mode, and so forth. Then the terminal reset itself and I instantly had a solid connection at the usual signal strength of 84 (which was very heartening). The terminal began downloading its configuration information, reset itself again, and we were online and ready to roll.
I would not say the HN7000S is any faster than the DW7000 terminal was. In fact, it seems to perform identically. HOWEVER, I did notice something inteteresting and which I took as one of the "gotchas" of this swap: During the manual configuration phase, the tech support guy had me set the DVB mode to DVB-S2-ACM and the frequency to 1100, among other settings. But once everything was finished, I checked out the control center on the terminal just to see what differences were there....and I don't see ANY. The DVB mode says DVB-S just as the DW7000 said.......the frequency is back to the 1359 MHz just as the DW7000 had. In the latter portion of the upgrade with the tech support guy, I do recall a screen that said it was swapping my serial #'s between the old and new terminals and I have to think it did bring over the old settings from the DW7000. I was told this swap just basically changed our records at Hughes so that their system would send the configuration information from our old DW7000 to the new terminal and automatically put us on a "list" to be moved to a new DVB-S2 gateway.
The DVB mode and frequency the tech support guy gave me at registration-time were just to get the terminal to see the satellite well enough that we could actually perform the registration.
I will also note here that my signal strength on the DW7000 has always been 83-86 but when we got the HN7000S working on the satellite using the DVB-S2-ACM setting and the 1100 frequency, my signal strength was a measley 63. Once the serial number swap finished and the terminal reset itself (that all happens automatically), my signal strength was back to the 84 that I normally see, so obviously I must be on the same bird and parms that I was on before we did the terminal swap.
All I can say is that as long as everything keeps working like this, I'm a happy camper (performance on the HN7000S is virtually identical to what it was with the DW7000 terminal). I'm apparently still on the older DVB-S gateway instead of the newer DVB-S2 ACM and I'm curious about that because one reason I thought HNS has been pushing these terminal upgrades was to get more people onto DVB-S2 gateways and off of the DVB-S gateways, but in my case I seem to have a nice new terminal that says HN7000S on it but I'm still on the same bird and same DVB gateway with all of the same settings I was on before with the DW7000 terminal, and if that's the case then I do have to wonder exactly what was accomplished today?
UPDATE: 3-15-2009
Hughes moved us to a DVB-S2 gateway a couple days ago and performance is much better. Latency dropped a little and upload speeds improved quite a bit. Both of those items together are most likely what make our connection seem "snappier" but I'm fine with that!
We are now on 89W 1270 Msps 33 (that's the same satellite, IA8, we were on before but a different transponder channel, as we were formerly on 89W at 1359 Mhz). Hughes is able to instruct your sat modem to automatically change you like that, which is nice....no additional commissioning needed.
Now I guess we have to watch out for when Hughes decides to force us to the next upgrade, which would be from the HN7000S to the HN9000 which would mean having to get a new dish as well.
Followup comments:  
T1 jockey
| boonies too I too am way out in the boonies and do everything through a data connection. I was one of the original direcpc/hughes clients, I guess a beta since they didn't bill me the first 6-8 months. Back then download was satelite and upload was through a modem. It was only fit for downloading data, I had two ISDN circuits for real work, 128k each, it worked, they were about $110 each per month. Dialup averaging 16k was out of the question. I eventually replaced the two ISDN circuits and satellite, and phone service with a single T1 and voip from packet8 (T1 NOT from packet8).
Order a full 1.54 T1, prices are now down to $300/month including local loops for rural areas. Your productivity will skyrocket, VPN is rock solid. | |
| | birdonawire
join:2002-02-16
Polk, OH
 ·HughesNet Satellit..
| Re: boonies too Yeah, I remember that kind of system! Years back, we had the grey-dish phone-line-return system that uploaded via a dial-up modem connected to your ISP, and downloaded data over the dish. The satellite modem had a bad habit of overheating (that sucker really got hot), and when they came out with the new 2-way service the indoor equipment was pretty much two of the old-style modems, one stacked on top of the other, and since they were the same kind of modem that was long known to overheat, you'd now have two modems overheating unless you set a fan on top of the modem cases themselves to draw off some of the heat. Amazing how far things have come since then!
How is your T1 configured? Is it a PRI or a bundled T1 with an Internet port? I've priced them off-and-on through the years but always nearly fell over at the price (which was close to 3 times what you are paying for yours).  | |
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