I have been closely monitoring the performance of our Hughes Net satellite internet system over the past several months.  I’ve noticed a significant drop in signal strength since the leaves came out on the trees.  Apparently the dish was not shooting over the large poplar tree on the far side of our pond as the installer thought.  Even with the reduced signal strength I did not see a degradation in the speed.  However, for the past several months I have measured a significant drop in download speeds (as low as 250 kb/s) each evening.  I assume this was due to overloading that was occurring as their customers all got on the web each evening.

However, I have noticed a significant improvement in the evening download speeds over the past three weeks.  Perhaps, Hughes Net is finally starting to move a significant number of their customers off of their overcrowded satellite to the new satellite they launched earlier this year.

Overall, I continued to be satisfied with the service since it is so much better than the ISDN speeds (128kb/s) we were getting before I installed the satellite system.  I’ll continue to provide updates when I can.

Fred