First I want to start off by saying, I live in the country, the only option we have is dial up, or satellite for internet.
I am disabled, and was forced to move back into my parents house. When my disability was finally approved, and I started getting paid, I decided to sign up for Hughesnet Satellite internet service. This was in January of last year.
Now to start with I signed up over the phone, my old dial-up connection was not reliable enough to do anything. I gave them my credit card information, and all they gave me was an order number. I paid over $500 for the equipment, and to have it installed, and I signed up for their Pro plan at $69.99 a month.
Now I tried to set up my e-mail accounts through hughesnet, and I couldn't log onto the site, to do it. I called and they told me I need a password, but I never got one, they told me I would have chosen it when I signed up online, I told them I ordered it over the phone, and it went back and forth. I ended up calling like 5 times to try to get it set up, before I just gave up.
At first I was fairly happy with the service, it didn't work nearly as good as advertised, but it was far better then what I had. But it kept getting slower and slower over the next 2 months, I called numerous times, and always was told that there was nothing wrong, and that maybe it was weather, or cloud cover.
Finally after almost 2 weeks of calling every day, they agreed to have an installer come out and check it. Well it turns out that the original installers didn't even tighten the bolts down all the way on the wall mount they used, and the satellite dish was way out of alignment, and the new people couldn't even get it to line up at all. They suggested putting it on a pole mount like my DirectTV dish. Well I coughed up the extra $100 for that, and they installed that, but then they couldn't get it to work either, and they had to call out, here Hughesnet themselves had to do something on their end for it to start working again, even though all the installers did was move the dish, they didn't unplug or reset anything.
Well it started working again, but still I have never gotten a download or upload speed over 150 kbps, ever. No matter how many times I call about it, I end up on the phone for 2 hours with someone who tells me to do the same thing I did yesterday when I called, and then they either disconnect me, or tell me they don't see any problems.
And now my mom started doing online college classes, so she needs the internet connection to work. Well the other day all of a sudden, it starts working slower than my old dial-up connection, I mean like 8 kbps, so I call them up again and after an hour and a half on the phone, the guy tells me that I went over the fair usage policy. He tells me that I can only do 375 mb of internet traffic every 24 hrs, I ask when did this start? I used to download way more than that with no problems, he tries to tell me it has always been that way, and tells me I should upgrade my plan for another $10 per month, and that would let me do 425 mb of internet traffic in 24 hrs. Now I am sorry, but this is ridiculous, when you read their "Fair usage policy" stuff, (which I was never informed of) it says that only a small percentage of users will ever go over 200 mb, and that "normal" internet activity will fall way below the limit. Now I am a graphic designer, and I occasionally still do free-lance jobs, and one of my files can put me over their "fair usage policy" not to mention, if I need to go online to get some source material, or god forbid I wanted to download a movie sometime.
They give you a window between 3:00am, and 6:00am (it used to be 7) where you can download without using up your "fair usage" allotment. But since most movies you would download require you to input POST data, you can't schedule them to download, and the same goes with trying to update my programs, the ones I use you can't set up to auto-update. And even if I were to upgrade to the next level, even 1 movie will put me over the fair usage amount.
I guess I am getting long winded, but the newest problem, is I had lost my wallet, and had to cancel my credit card, so I switched to having an invoice mailed to me, which costs an extra $5 a month, but guess... What I never got one, they charged me for it, but I never got one. I finally got it set up so I can see my account info online, and it hasn't even been updated since 2 months ago, but it shows $74.99 for each month, but I never got a bill.
I don't understand how they can get away with advertising "always on, Super-fast internet" when it hasn't once come anywhere close to being as fast as they advertise, and if you download a single movie, you'll be stuck with less than 12k per second downloads for 24hrs. If my mom didn't need it for her class, I would dump it. I couldn't be more displeased with the level of customer service (or lack of customer service). The way they implement new restrictions without notice. And plus if you try to check out your usage to see if you are close to the limit, it doesn't even show you anything from the last 3 hrs.
In closing I would recommend that anyone interested in satellite internet stay as far away from Hughsnet as possible. And if anyone knows of anyway to make these issues any better, I would love to hear them.
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