Does anyone here have Hughes Net? What kind of download speeds do you get?
My in laws in Wisconsin have it. I was there last week; the speed was abysmal; took at least a minute to load every single page. I don’t know how they stand it.
I had a feeling it was slow. Thanks.
I used to have it. The download speed was marginally acceptable, but the latency was awful! I tried to play World of Warcraft on there and it was abysmal. I’d press the “fireball” button, and it wouldn’t start casting for almost a second (my average latency was 900ms).
The worst part is that they have a “fair use” limit, so if you use what they consider to be too much of their bandwidth, they “throttle you back” to dial-up speed for a day or so. I dumped that dish in the trash the moment they strung fiber-optic cables into my neighborhood.
Thanks for the info. Now I KNOW I don’t want it.
My aircard isn’t all that bad. Right this minute I’m getting 1.5Mbps. I don’t watch movies on my computer or play games of any sort, so this speed is adequate for my needs.
You can pay extra and get really slow service as opposed to really really slow service. We dumped it because we were sick of being throttled back any time we watched 10 minutes of video.
They throttle back if you exceed 200 MB. That’s what we call heavy downloading if you’re in 1996.
We were paying for their highest level of service. Windows and Mac OS/X both had updates the same day. I downloaded one, my wife downloaded the other, and we got throttled back for it.
Ditto when my son bought three albums from the iTunes store on the same day that I received a marked-up manuscript from my editor on one of my books.
I used it in Iraq. It was very fast when I wasn’t throttled. But there were various pricing plans depending on speed and bandwidth. Me and two others were paying around $600 a month if I remember correctly. This is after purchasing the dish and equipment for $2000. Only one of us played War Craft, but he had no major lag or latency issues and played WoW just about every day.
We were getting between 600 to 1024kbps download speeds and 40 - 128kbps uplaod with a hard throttle limit of 5GB per month. I forgot the soft throttle limit, but we hit it often.
$600 U.S.? If so, holy cow! They charge a lot more over there than they do here!
Well, the latency isn’t really all their fault. The lightspeed lag alone to a geostationary satellite and back is close to half a second. The other 400 milliseconds (annoying lag on it’s own) is probably their fault though.
Understood. The signal has to go from my antenna on the 45th N parallel to a geosynchronous satellite over the equator, back down to Hughsnet, off to the server, back to Hughsnet, up to the bird, and back down to me. That’s quite a trip. But it still sucks.
Yeah, and that was just the middle package they recommend for about 5 computers. Expensive, but faster than the cheap service they are peddling in the States, apparantly. They even offer a 4096kbps dl speed for $6,000 a month.
$600 was pricey split three ways, but it was worth it to have some of the only decent internet on the FOB.
We tended to get around .4 Mb/s download which isn’t much slower than our current Verizon based wireless. My big complaint was the consistency, alot of time it was nothing or super slow. I never noticed the latency but I don’t play games either. The wireless was also $10 a month cheaper and you can take it with you.