The government agency that regulates satellite internet providers is the Federal Trade Commission or the FTC. I have filed a complaint with them about Hughesnet's "Fair Access Policy" and suggest that anyone having the same trouble as I am do the same. The FTC website is http://www.ftc. Gov/
This is my story:
We have Hughesnet as our internet provider because we live in a rural area and this is the only high speed internet service we can get. We signed up for this service because we received a notice giving us a special price as part of the U.S. Government Recovery Act. Because of the special price we were given, we have a download limit of 200 MB per day. We have had the service for about 7 months.
During this period, their modem has locked-up on average 5 times a week which requires us to unplug it and then plug it back in and wait until it resets itself. Now, for the past week, we are losing our download allowance without even being on the internet. I did as they suggested and unpluged their modem from our router and we still lost download allowance... Again and I stress, we were not even connected to the internet. It doesn't seem to matter whether we are connected to the internet or not, we quickly loose our download allowance. I have turned off all automatic updates for our software and it is still happening. We have a wireless router that is password protected and I have changed the password several times but this has made no difference. We have a virus protection and firewall so the possibility of a virus causing this is slim.
I have called their so called "customer service" department every day this week hoping I will finally get someone who will help me but so far they all just tell me it's basically my problem and they are not going to do anything. I have complained about their faulty modem numerous times but they don't seem to care. Each time I call, they tell me to do something like stop all automatic updated, unplug the modem from the router, etc. I do this and when it makes no difference, I call them back and they just come up with some other excuse as to why this is happening.
Hughesnet has a monopoly in rural areas because we have no choice other than dial-up which is like having no internet service at all. It seems to me like they are ignoring our complaints because they are causing this to happen in an attempt to force us to upgrade our service at $25-$30 more a month. We seem to be at their mercy.
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