does anyone here use Hughesnet for their highspeed internet?

[w8liftinglady]

I live in the sticks,and we only have dialup right now.Have you used hughesnet? Is it worth the money?

[qnr]

1. not me, but here's a kick in case someone has recently logged on that does n/t

[Kutjara]

2. Well, if you have no other options...

...then it's probably a good way to go. Any broadband is going to be lightyears better than dialup.

I do find that psychotic woman on the HughesNet ads to be intensely irritating, though. "Achieve the broadband speeds you've been craving. How cool is that?" Where's my gun?

[Ghost in the Machine]

3. I've had it for about a year and a half now...

The initial cost can be a little high, especially when they get you for installation. My $50 install wound up costing $400... and if you don't pay for the modem and dish up front (yes, you buy them and own them forever) they'll add $40/mo to your bill... The first 15 months cost me right at $109.00/mo, but now it's down to $59.99 since the equipmet is paid off.

As far as speed goes, I wouldn't trade it for the world. I download about 10MB/min and pages load lightning quick... except for secure pages where it has to go through the SSL. Something in the network firewall slows it down since you're running off of a proxy server, and it has to verify your I.P. number.

I've heard it's not good for playing games in real time, but I've never tried. My cousin had it also, but discontinued it because of this fact. Something about a delay in the direct satellite connection. The dish actually works like a radio transmitter/reciever. When it gets super heavy clouded over, and sometimes during a heavy downpour, you'll lose your signal. Last winter, I had to go out and wipe the snow and ice off the dish so it would recieve.

I'd say go for it, if you're not into gaming online. Even if you are, just keep you a dial up account. My Bellsouth dialup account costs me $4.95/mo with my choice rewards plan.

Hope this helps you out some.

PEACE!

Ghost

[Kutjara]

4. I assume you mean 10 MB/sec rather than /min.

The figure you quote looks very slow.

The reason why you can't play online games on a satellite connection is basically because of the speed of light. Geostationary communications satellites have to orbit at an altitude of over 22,000 miles. Even if the satellite is directly overhead (and most of them are actually closer to the equator than that), any communication signal has to make a round trip of 44,000 miles. Imagine you're playing an online game. Your character swings its sword at an enemy. The command to swing the sword has to travel at least 44,000 miles to reach the game server, then the response from the server has to return the same 44,000 miles. That's an 88,000 mile journey for each command and response. Since the speed of light is 186,000 per second, the signal path adds nearly half a second of delay to everything you do. From my experience, if you have latency of even a few hundred milliseconds, online games become unplayable. A half-second (500 millisecond) delay is therefore far too much, particularly when server and switching latency can add another 100ms or so.

Keeping dialup isn't going to help. Very few onling games will allow dialup play because the bandwidth is just too low. If you can't get wired broadband, I'm afraid online games are out of the question.

[Ghost in the Machine]

5. No, my download speeds are approximately 10MB/min

It usually runs about 119- 129 Kb's/sec ... but then again, this computer is 8 years old, has only 256 megs of RAM and a Pentium III 450MHz processor... it's a dinosaur, but I love it. I totally wiped it out and reformatted it, installing what *I* want on it. Basically, it's built for me, and I know it inside and out. I've got 2 laptops and another computer, but this is the one I choose as my main computer.

I have been looking into a new one though.. but it'll be bare-bones too.

Hell, just give me a mother board, processor and power supply, I'll do the rest. I've got two 120 gig hard drives, cd burners, dvd burners... and licenses to win98, ME, 2000 Professional & XP PRO... and somewhere, on one of these disks, I've got Solaris 10 burned. I haven't been brave enough to try it yet though.

:hi:

Ghost

[Kutjara]

6. Ah, ok, I thought satellite broadband speeds would be higher.

You're getting rates more akin to basic DSL. I'm assuming you're using an ethernet card to connect to the HughesNet router, and even old ethernet cards work at 10 MB/s so that's not the bottleneck. The HughesNet website says the home service (their basic offer) should be "up to" 700 KB/s, so your rate looks to be somewhat low.

Even the maximum ProPlus service only gets 1.5 MB/s, which compares unfavorably with cable and some DSL services, some of which are now exceeding 12 MB/s, but, if there's nothing else available, 700 KB/s is a hell of a lot better than 56 KB/s.