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  😛