Bone In The Throat

First of all let me start by saying;

Under no circumstances should you consider HughesNet satellite services.

When we signed up for HughesNet it was awesome, we were pleased and totally happy to get rid of Verizon.

We were so pleased that after the first month we upgraded our service. 

BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ, Danger “Will Robinson”, WARNING, WARNING, “Antimatter containment failing, Warp Core explosion will occur in 3 seconds”

And that’s when it went to hell.

We opted for the super duper premium plan, the fastest, bestest, razzle dazzle plan they offered. Which still cost less than what we’d been paying the bastards over at Verizon.  

Unfortunately, this move resulted in a degradation of the service to almost total un-usability instead of an improvement.

One of the things you don’t consider when you think about communication satellites is that the satellite is essentially a reflector (That’s seriously inaccurate but for the purposes of illustrating this point, it will do.  For those of you that might not remember… Radio, & Microwave is all part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The practical upshot of this is that a lot of stuff in the EM spectrum acts like just like the flashlight you played with as a kid in your backyard.) 

Picture a flashlight pointing at the sky, in say, New York. If you wanted that light to fall in Los Angeles you could put a mirror in orbit and then reflect the beam down onto Los Angeles. It’s just a big triangle. But if you have heavy storms or cloud cover over either the source, the destination, or both, then the light falling in Los Angeles is likely to be obstructed or dim.

When the same model is applied to satellite service it’s easy to see why there will be good days and bad days. Satellite Internet has the added problem that all data requests are being sent from a little dish to the satellite, then being bounced back down to the HughesNet station, then put out on the internet, then the requested data is returned along the same path.

After explaining all of this to the other half and that we should expect that sometimes there will be transient problems. The other half said, “Oh that makes sense.” Which is why when we started noticing that the service was slower than it had been, we looked at the weather reports across the midwest saw all the storms and said, “meh,” it’ll pass. 

It wasn’t until later when we noticed things like our data allocation being chewed up when we weren’t home, that I started the investigation.  At first I thought someone had managed to compromise our WiFi password. No problem, I changed it to something a bit tougher. Now it’s a stone bitch to enter on some of our devices. 

After running through every single possibility and accounting for all devices on our network. I concluded that something else was going on. 

Even when we’d purposefully disconnected the satellite box from the rest of our network backbone and left the house, we still saw our network allocation disappearing, thats when we started asking questions.

The answers we got from HugheNet were not acceptable. 

To date we’ve been told:

“Your router is always transmitting data to our network.” (Uh not really, a router doesn’t work that way. It may check daily for software updates but it’s not sucking up gigabytes of data by itself.)

“You should only have your computer connected directly to our satellite box.” (Oh?? Then why do all your commercials show families with their tablets and computers and games? That’s more than one device, would you care to walk us through the configuration???)

“Too many people are using the service right now.” (Really? So you’ve oversold your service to the detriment of all, instead of telling folks there’s a waiting list, while you increased service capacity?)

“We’ve been having problems with the “super duper premium plan, the fastest, bestest, razzle dazzle plan” (Then why did you allow us or anyone else to change to that plan knowing that it wasn’t working properly? And why when you’ve changed us back are we still having problems?)

The sound of silence, then suddenly, we got a month free. Even then the system is running the monthly allocation of data down in a matter of days.  They claim they’ve got us in a two year contract. I contend that because the service is not working properly, and is not functional for common activities that they advertise their service is fit for, like:

Streaming media such as Netfllix, Hulu, Apple TV rentals, etc

Accessing the management console of my domain

Email with graphics such as family photos, not downloading or taking hours to download.

Constant disruptions to email retrieval

Web pages that are being apparently blocked.

That their two year contract is toilet paper.  

They’re in breach as they are not providing the services they’ve promised to provide.  No matter. The other half is dealing with it.  I figure at some point there’s going to be an attorney letter and HugheNet will be out here removing their dish from our roof. But I’m staying the hell out of it.

For right now I’m being a good little network technician and connecting or disconnecting the satellite from our network as requested, because I’m over it.  I’m sick of technology or maintenance of technology becoming all consuming. My internal shit is working just fine.

I’ve written and posted this blog as a warning  and follow-up to a previous post about the conversion to satellite. Bottom line…

DON’T go HughesNet.

As an aside, since the satellite connection has become so wonky I’m using my phone hotspot more often than ever before.

It’s a little bit of a pain in the ass, but when I want email or web access I just connect that way.  Most of the time the one bar of 4G signal on my phone is faster than the satellite. So I’m running in “Burst” mode. I’ll queue up stuff and transmit it when I connect my computer to the internet via my phone. 

It’s interesting because I’m spending less time mindlessly surfing the internet. I’m not reading as much of the news and generally I’m happier. Oh there are things I’m reading that are mindboggling and I’ve got a lot to say about them but reading these pieces on my phone somehow diminishes the likelihood that I’ll write about them.