It has been nearly two weeks since our Hughes Net system was installed and I am still pleased with the service.   The speed has been close to the advertised speed and there has been almost no downtime due to weather–eventhough we have had two significant snow falls since it was installed. 

It is really a pleasure to actually be able to download a 30 to 50mB file or a video in only a few minutes.  With our prior ISDN system the downloads of this size would have taken an hour or more so we avoided videos becasue they just weren’t worth the wait. 

If your moving from dial-up to Hughes Net I believe you should be very pleased with the speed–assuming you get a good installer.  If you have recently moved to the country from an urban area where you had cable internet or DSL you will probably not be as pleased with the speed. Your choice may come down to waiting for DSL, Cable or maybe WiMax or going ahead and moving to satellite where you can get speeds 15-20X faster  than dial-up while your waiting for the infrastructure to improve in your area.  I wouldn’t trust the cable and DSL providers on promise dates because most have a long history of being overly optimistic by multiple years!

If my experience with the system changes I’ll be sure to post my negative experiences. But as of today–so far, so good.

Fred

Unfortunately our installation was delayed by bad weather , but we finally got the new Hughes Net System installed last Saturday.  After the installation was completed I had to re-configure our router and the rest of our farm network.  Our farm network is fairly complex because of wireless links between our barns and the house (spaning more than a quarter mile), which are used to feed security camera video to the house and the webcam images to our website.  Those of you that watch the llamacam have probably noticed that the cameras have been up and down a few times over the past week as I’ve been trying to work out a few kinks in the network.  We have also been plagued with a number of hardware failures that have taken the cameras down.  Hopefully, I can get most of these issues resolved this weekend if the weather cooperates.

So far I have been pleased with the speed and stability of the HughesNet Satellite internet.  It has been operational for about six days.  I have only had two brief outages of about 5 minutes each, caused by heavy snow and some ice build up on the dish.  Since we still have our ISDN line, our new router can detect the outage and outomatically switch to the ISDN line if the satellite feed is interupted.

I am getting download speeds of between 1200 and 1500 kbs (kilobits per second) and updload speeds of 500-600 kbs.  These speed are about 10 times faster than our ISDN connection.  It is certainly nice to be able to click on a video on CNN or YouTube and not have to wait 45 minutes for it to download.  In most cases streaming video starts within a few seconds and the download feed stays ahead of the playback.  I’ll keep you posted if my satisfaction changes. 

According to our installers, the key to sucess is the quality of the installation.  Our installers were fantastic and took considerable care in locating the dish and making sure it was securely mounted and properly aimed. 

Fred  😛