Has anyone been able to get NetFlix to work with Hughes.net (Hughes is part of DirecTV as far as I can tell. Same satellite anyway).
I had it hooked up late Friday, and watched about half of a movie. Worked fine.
Couldn’t get anything on Sat or Sun. Wifi hooked up fine, Netflix asked if I wanted to continue watching where I left off, and then said it could not connect to NetFlix.
I suspect it’s my bandwidth. NetFlix requires .5 Mbps, and recomends 1.5Mbps. I’m getting .9Mbps (though it varies).
0.9 mbps is very low for streaming, but it shouldn’t cause a “cannot connect to Netflix” error. Mostly you’ll just have a very poor picture quality. The connect error would be caused by either complete failure of network connectivity, although there are a plethora of other possibilities, some of which are outside of your control (DNS errors, misconfiguration in a server somewhere in the path from you to the Netflix servers, etc). Satellite internet introduces even more possible failure modes.
The first thing to try is reboot all the involved equipment (your TV, your router, and your modem). More detailed troubleshooting can follow if it still doesn’t work.
Yeah, I haven’t rebooted my router and modem yet. Another problem will be that I’m limited to 250 Megs per 24 hour period. It seemed like I was just OK with that limit for the one movie I watched most of.
Not worried about hi-def picture quality or anything like that. I know that’s out of my reach. For the movie I did watch, the pic quality was what I’m used to.
I hope I can get this to work. If we could get rid of Showtime/Cinimax/HBO, it should save us money, as well as have something to watch that WE can pick.
I knew someone with Hughes.net several years ago. They had a cap at something like 250MB/month. When you hit the cap throughput dropped to something like modem speeds (5Kbs or something).
Yep. But it’s 250Mb in a 24 hour period. Then it goes to unusable (unless you buy more ‘Tokens’).
This is called your ‘Anytime Allowance’. More Mb are available off peak. Which is something like 2am to 5am.
Anyway, tried again last night after rebooting everything. It did the same thing. I connected to NetFlix. It took a few minutes and appeared to download the movie. It played about 30 seconds of the movie and then stopped and the screen said ‘Rebuffering’. After about 5 minutes it gave the notice that it can’t connect to NetFlix.
And the download allowance was not used up. That’s what’s so strange. It connects, starts, and then can’t connect. It does this on two different TV’s.
Gonna be googling. Also am going to try right on my Desktop with no router involved.
Well, I give up. HughesNet does give mostly what the contract says. UP TO 10Mbps. I never see more than 1Mbps. Their commercials are very misleading if not down right lies.
Lots and lots of people bitching online. At least one class action lawsuit was started.
This thread started when I talked to a neighbor that also has HughesNet. He says he gets streaming, but I think maybe he is ordering DVD’s on his TV, waits for the mail and away he goes. Still waiting for more info from him. There was some confusion when we talked.
Head of the HOA in this valley (no, it’s actually a good HOA, that you can donate to if you want, it’s just a community group really) is trying to get better service. From anyone. He’s just as frustrated.
I understand the difficulty of providing internet to remote locations. Except… DirecTV has no problem streaming anything I want (except internet). 24x7. I’ve been getting it since 1993. I can only assume that DTV put MUCH better birds up. HughesNet can’t even handle a couple of youtubes.
So I wait. At least I can get email. And surf the SDMB.
I can tell you that Netflix works reasonably well on 1.5 megabit DSL. But my DSL is true 1.5 megabit (not “up to”) and has no caps or throttling. It might take a Netflix title 20 seconds or so to start playing, but then it plays without any pauses or buffering.
My experience with satellite is everything you do comes with an automatic ~1 second delay and it does indeed hit a brick wall after 250 MB or so of downloading. I think streaming video uses about a gigabyte (1000 megabytes) an hour for decent quality. Best case, with the 250 MB @ high-speed limit you wouldn’t get more than 15 min or so of streaming video with satellite.
This is pretty much what I always thought. So I never even bothered to stick my TV on my wi-fi. Then my neighbor said he has no problem streaming with the same system I have. :dubious: I was gobsmacked when he told me. He still hasn’t returned my email with some questions about this.
He can’t respond. He doesn’t have any bandwidth (or data allowance) left! :eek:
IMO, “satellite internet” is pretty close to last resort. In my military career, operating with only satcom was considered a “communications-austere” deployment and operations were massively restricted to what kinds of reachback they were allowed. Since I mostly worked with meteorological data, that wound up way down the priority list, so the forecasters were usually stuck with local resources only.
Billions of dollars spent on improving world-wide data gathering and analysis, totally out of reach because of a measly 1.5mbps downlink from DISA. Thanks.
Wanted to give everyone that had good ideas a follow up.
This morning, I took my router out of the loop and did manage to watch 32 minutes of a movie on my computer hooked up right to the modem. Really what I would expect considering my data allowance.
So. For the TV’s the wireless router was a roadblock. Not that it really matters. One quarter of a movie, is not particularly satisfying.
I still have not heard back from my neighbor that has no problems watching Netflix with HughesNet ‘Broadband’. I asked him to test it again, and have not heard back.
We are all busy. They are out of town this weekend.
Hm, I’m not sure that’s the correct conclusion. If I’m understanding correctly, you changed two things, you removed the router, and you used the computer rather than the TV as the streaming device. Either one could have caused the improvement, and in fact I would bet on the latter. The TV may have crappy software that doesn’t deal well with the latencies etc. of your satellite connection. A better test would be to use the TV without the modem, and then try the computer with the modem.
If it’s really true that the wifi is the bottleneck of a 1 mbps connection, you probably have some serious wifi interference and should try changing the wifi channel in your router (it should be either channel 1, 6, or 11). On the other hand if the TV is the problem, you could get a streaming device like a Roku, which will undoubtedly have better software (disclaimer: I work for Roku). Of course this is all moot if as you say you can’t get through a whole show without hitting your daily bandwidth cap.
:dubious: I was gobsmacked when he told me. He still hasn’t returned my email with some questions about this.