Those of you living in major cities rarely have to deal with this topic. Typically you have some unlimited cable connection or near enough to unlimited when it has a limit of something like 150 Gig. The other 80% of the country has to deal with sucky Internet speeds, vicious pricing of plans and draconian data limits. You only have to deal with that if you take a road trip. What brings this to the surface is the fact I’m currently dumping HughesNet Gen4.
When I first got Gen4 it wasn’t bad. Yes, it had a draconian 10 Gig monthly limit which severely impacted my ability to participate in BOINC projects. No, BOINC isn’t just for SETI anymore. We geeks with extra computers participate in things like curing AIDS, fighting Zika, cancer research and many other projects. We are much more involved in the betterment of the human species than we get credit for. Yes, we still search for ET while doing all of this good.
Not long ago AT&T consumed HughesNet. At first it seemed great. My sucky 10 Gig per month plan could be converted for roughly the same money to a sucky 10 Gig per month plan which had a much less sucky 50 Gig per month “bonus data” that could only be used between the hours of 2 a.m. and 8 a.m. local time. Easy to adapt. BOINC and most automatic system updates allow you to schedule the time they can use your Internet connection. Switching the time window took less than an hour for all of my machines and life was good.
Then disaster struck. Actually it struck twice. First I had a client which had me creating custom Linux ISO files. Since they wanted everything under the sun loaded on the ISO the thing was roughly 2 Gig in size. Naturally they wanted me working on this during normal business hours so the 10 Gig cap didn’t last long. Neither did the pathetic little Gigs loaded onto various hot spots.
My second disaster was the HT1000 HughesNet modem dying. I had it so long customer service had to send an HT1100 modem and tell me to scrap the one I had. No interest in having the thing shipped back to them so they could recycle it. Yet another chunk on my ever growing electronics recycling pile. Some day I will fill the trunk of a ride and head off to recycling. That day better be soon or I will need 2 trunks. Stuff just ain’t made to last anymore.
I don’t care how they push the HT1100 modem. I have had nothing but slooooooow Internet and problems since I got it. I even upgraded my wireless router and range extender to us AC1200. While I can copy to drives on the network much faster, I cannot get better Internet.
A couple of weeks ago things got unbearable. I couldn’t connect to squat. I rebooted the entire network and saw little improvement. I finally had to bite the bullet and open yet another chat window with technical support. Before doing this I went to a machine which was hard wired to a router that was hard wired to the modem. I ran the internal connectivity tests for the modem showing 10% packet loss 2-3.5 second packet delays.
How HughesNet wins any awards for customer service is beyond me. Those technical support chat windows are serviced by people who have no technical skills what so ever. They run through a script. The entire point of the script is to get you to reboot your network as quickly as possible so the chat representative can kick the can down the road. Despite my constant pasting of connectivity test results showing the packet loss and delays they insisted on me rebooting my network because they claimed to have “discovered a wireless router was under performing.”
For the non-technical people here who have never had the joy of dealing with HughesNet, the connectivity test is built into the modem. The only think it uses your network for is to display the page with the “start” link and then display the results. It runs using the modem, the coax cable out to the dish, the dish and HughesNet infrastructure. Your network plays no part in the execution of this test.
At first, 10% packet loss doesn’t sound horrible. You have to understand though, when you click a link, if that click message is one of those packets, your browser is hung. You will never get to the page. If you are on a blog site using the post editor (as I was) trying to create new blog posts then your typing and formatting packets keep getting lost. Clicking “publish” and losing that packet is a real joy too.
Eventually the chat support person closed the chat window rather than actually provide support. The option to email a transcript of the chat to yourself didn’t work either. Thankfully I was able to print a physical copy.
No surprise, that was the last straw for HughesNet. I don’t care what service they come up with 20 years from now, I’m not buying. Neither will anyone I can tell about this experience.
Thus began the arduous task of locating a new, non-satellite Internet provider. I’ve had 2 line-of-sight services claim to serve my area but be unable to actually provide service. These line of sight services don’t pay for good signals, they have really weak transmitters which cannot transmit through trees or windmills. Since our government is building a massive wind farm out here that is a massive *^()*&)(*&ing problem. On Wednesday, hopefully the third time is the charm.
If I ever get one of these to work they come with no data caps. They may not be the speediest networks, but, in theory, they don’t quit working when it is cloudy. They claim not to be bothered by rain either, but my brother has one and when we get a good rain he has no Internet. He knows this because his kids call him and want him to come home to fix the Internet. Sigh.
Yes, there are some LTE services out here. For what they want I could build my own LTE tower. The most you can get with any of the plans I looked at was 30 Gig of data per month.
For those of you who wish to see a pretty good discussion on Internet speeds and what they really mean you should look at this post.
