Hughesnet internet option ?

[jmellana]

We're looking for alternatives for internet service, and are wondering if anyone can report on their experience in using "Hughesnet".

Methownet currently requires line-of-sight to towers that we are just short of possessing. We may well end up with OCEC once it upgrades its service in partnership with Methownet, but that could be up to several years away when it comes to our end of the road location. We know Starlink works quite well in our area, but would like to have an alternative to that if at all possible. Centurylink is currently not an option.

[cwesthoff40]

Before I went with Starlink I was using T-Mobile 5G Home Internet and it wasn't too bad.

Chris

[lil-red-rooster]

~~ We use NCIdata - Omak - no serious problems thus far !!

[RG]

Hughesnet was terrible when I had it 15 years ago.

[moose]

If you are avoiding starlink the only option is hughesnet. Will it work for you? Depends on your intended use. If you only require low data interactions, it could be fine, email, reading literature, education materials. If you want to include any high data use forget it. High data use would include any kind of video watching/streaming. Starlink works as one would hope it would.

[LCF]

We just got T mobile internet in Alton and it’s great. You can try their internet setup for two weeks for free to see if it works at your place. We got our setup In Wenatchee definitely works better than Century link

[AStaff]

I have hughesnet and its works fine!

When I moved here there was a waitlist for star link so it was recommended to get on the wait list but get hughesnet in the meantime. You have to start with a 2 year contract, which was the only downfall, but it worked fine, pretty cheap, good customer service, technician came out and set it up. You need a south facing view of the sky.

6 months go by and the starlink fairy arrives, I was curious about it so I set it up and briefly paid for both services at once to compare the 2. I could never really get the starlink to work properly, this was probably a fluke, but there was absolutely no customer service to help. when it did work it would cut out often. I disabled the starlink, intended to finish out my hughesnet contract and then reactivate the starlink and figure it all out later. By the time my contract ended starlink was a lot more expensive and my hardware was outdated. So I still have hughesnet, 80 bucks a month, works fine.

[damyanp]

Are you able to use Hughesnet for streaming TV and video calls? The impression I got was that it wasn't really suitable for these uses.

[katelyn2444]

We had hughesnet for 2 years. It was horrible. We would use up our alloted internet literally within the first 36 hours of the billing cycle. They offer "unlimited internet" but then throttle your speeds drastically once you go over your allotted amount, which for us was 2 days of streaming Netflix cartoons in the day time. Then we would just watch it pause and buffer constantly for the rest of the month. You have the option to login and purchase little bits of additional high speed internet at high prices. This would all be fine if hughesnet was cheap, but it's not, it's last resort internet and they know that and charge a lot. Also this was in Mazama, where if the wind blew the trees in front of the tiny line-of-sight gap between the trees the satellite was using, our internet cut out. I used to sit on the phone with their customer service reps several times a month asking why our internet was not working AGAIN, only to be told that it was too cloudy for the internet to function, or some other nonsense, and then they would credit that day's worth of internet back to my account. 5 years ago I moved out of mazama and switched to ncidatacom, then 2 years ago switched to starlink.

[sergey]

I had hugesnet before. It is not usable for most scenarios.

It works by relaying Internet traffic to geostationary orbit. Because of speed of light, the roundtrip is roughly one second. To render a typical page, say, in gMail, modern web applications may take 50-100 round-trips.

StarLink is the best Internet provider in the valley today.

Sergey Solyanik
Benson Creek