To any future ISP customer needing remote access to your employer, looking at any satellite ISP service: Don't go walking ignorant into that good night. If you MUST do satellite Internet, then so be it. But don't be thinking that you are getting an Internet connection comparable to any other ISP. With these guys, the DEVIL is really in the DETAILS. You must ask them, very very specifically, down to the raw technical questions, whether your specific application will (or better yet, HAS BEEN KNOWN) to work on HughesNet. If satellite Internet is really your only "broadband" Internet option and you can't ask the tough questions, get a qualified technical professional who knows the satellite ISP market to work with you to do it. It IS worth the money.
Shortlist of issues I've had with the service over 4 years:
- IPSec VPN is actively blocked on the basic residential class, as it is with most providers (even though most providers will claim it to not be supported, they generally allow it to pass). Even IPSec on TCP and NAT traversal (NAT-T) fail. I had chosen HughesNet precisely because, as DirecWay, I had tested their service and found their service to be acceptable for IPSec VPN. Obviously, they've changed since
- Various web pages, including (but by no means confined to) 2 sites I hit often (www.ponyexpressbsa.org is one of them), return 404 errors irregularly (but more often than not), requiring me to go to my place of employment to access those pages. Calling HughesNet Customer Care on this problem got me a fix for the problem after 4 days of waiting and about 3 hours on the phone. One of those hours was spent waiting; the second hour was mostly spent trying to decrypt whatever excuse for English the support staff were speaking; the third hour, which was the fourth day of waiting, was troubleshooting (1/2 meaningless, 1/2 meaningful) with no mangling of the spoken language. Unfortunately, whatever they did to fix the problem has disappeared, and the problem has returned; I simply don't have the time to wait another 3 hours on the phone to get a fix I have already done due diligence to acquire.
- My employer also has an SSL VPN solution that they have indicated that they will be moving to in the near future. Unfortunately, the SSL VPN solution will not work on HughesNet, because as part of HughesNet's "Turbo Page" feature, their DNS services actually *lie*, providing valid answers to DNS names that have no root-server-referencable Internet existence. (Go ahead, HughesNet users... Fire up your nslookup and try looking up www..[com|org|net|pick-your-favorite-domain] and see what you'll get. Usually, you'll get a valid response referring to a HughesNet address like 63.251.179.5 or something like that.) Unfortunately, this breaks my employer's SSL VPN solution. Oh yes, I'm sure that HughesNet will say that I can get around this by going to the Pro Plus or Business solutions... But my company's not paying for my Internet access anymore, and I don't have $90/month to shell out of my budget to anyone when I'm already paying $250 / month total for telecommunications services for my family (I barely have the $60).
The slow speed that many users complain about here, I am less concerned about. The speed is adequate for my needs, even if I can't download 5 YouTube videos. And yes, I can justify $60/month, even on my own dime, for this technology. What I am troubled by is that their Internet connection, however fast or slow, has been rigged to be incapable of behaving like a standard Internet connection in any way, specifically so that they can upsell their various features to you *after* they hook you out of ignorance.
The sad part is that I, as a computer networking professional, was the ignorant one.
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