It has been a bad week for our HughesNet Broadband.  Our system has experienced slow response on and off for the past several days.  HughesNet even sent a technician to the house to address the issue.  Once he arrived (two days later) the inital hardware problem had corrected itself, but the system was still experiencing very slow download speeds–approaching dial up speeds.  The technican call Hughesnet and they told him to have me take the issue up with the Hughesnet call center.

The Hughesnet call center is located in one of the mega call centers in India.  What I have learned after spending nearly six hours on the phone is that their only objective is to find some way to get your system to pass a “web responsiveness test” with a time lower than 13 seconds so that they can get you off the phone, close the ticket and move on to the next complaint. They don’t really try to fix your slow speed issues.  In fact I was told by the call center person that speeds below dial up were acceptable because they do not guarantee download speeds!!  One trick they will use is to keep passing you to a new person to help diagnose your problem.  Eventually they will ask you to start making changes to the setup of your browser network setting that force your system to access their site through a “proxy server”.  Once you use the proxy server I have found that magically your system will pass their test.  However, when you reset your settings to the recommended values (no proxy server) things degrade again.  In other words this is just an approach they use to get you out of their hair so they can close the ticket.

The bottom line is I am becoming very dissatisfied with the Hughesnet service and I am particularly dissatisfied with their India based technical support.  The technical support is worthless.  You might as well just wait for the problem to self correct or use dial up!  It is interesting that they never ask one to fill out a customer survey.  I am sure they already know what answer they will get.  Some searching on the web has turned up some class action law suits against Hughesnet.  Perhaps their house of cards will begin to crumble.

I am told that Comcast may be coming to our area soon.  I will switch in a flash.

Well enough ranting for now.

Fred