Hughes.net (formerly DirecWay) Fair Access Policy + Price Increase = Unhappy Customer Germantown Maryland

Limit FAP time by limiting what you see on your web pages

I am not a consumer of HughesNet, but am victim to its restrictions as I am currently residing in a household that subscribes to HughesNet and understand the frustration you all are dealing with. I was surprised at how just simply surfing the internet for a few hours, checking mail, and watching an occasional 2-3 minute video on YouTube can enact this preposturous "Fair Access Policy". One solution that will not circumvent the FAP, but may allow you to use the internet at higher speeds longer is to disable your web browser from downloading all those little pictures and gifs that appear on almost all web pages (such as ad pics, the little sunshine gif next to your weather report, etc.). You can also turn off any animation that plays on a web page (yahoo likes to do this on their home page) and also sound can be disabled. To do this, simply click on Tools on your browser and select Internet Options.

From there, click on the Advanced Tab and scroll down till you see the Multimedia section. Uncheck the boxes next to Enable automatic image resizing, Play animation on web pages, play sounds in web pages, show pictures, and smart image dithering. (These steps are for windows XP, but I believe earlier versions are similar.)

If you're trying to find out who coached the Trailblazers in 1994 or what anti De Sitter space means, need a good hummus recipe or what not and don't need pictures in your quest for information, this is not a bad way to surf the internet and decreases the amount of data you download through HughesNet servers, thus reducing the tendency toward engaging the FAP. (It's also faster!) But if you're a photo intensive surfer, file sharing or need to watch video, this recommendation won't do you any good. Follow the other people's recommendations: DROP HUGHESNET AND NEVER LOOK BACK!!

Hughes Net (Or any satellite service) as last resort.

The home 200 MB a day is not much more than what is theoretically achievable by a 56k modem in 24 hours. Realistically its over about double. But consider the price difference. A dial-up is $10. Satellite is $70. 7x the price tag for double the performance? Also consider that low speed DSL in a lot of places is $15 and Cable Modem $30.
But one thing satellite provider never talk about in their advertising is latency. The latency of satellite is and always will be horrible. Until someone comes about making a consumer service laser satellite ISP. It was truly a step backwards to get rid of the dial-up up-link with the satellite down-link service. As the satellite up-link doubles the latency problems. I can understand why RV customers would want a satellite up-link, but why not maintain options?
The service isn't horrendous in quality. If your within the hidden bounds of their service it is a decent service. Down times are very few and far between.
But it is way over priced. It WAS a competitive price for broadband, back in the late 90's. But the worst problem though is that NONE of the satellite service providers are clear with the limitations of satellite and that they purpose it as a genuine competitor to DSL or cable modem when it is clearly not. They do not tell the consumer about the FAP only until after they exceeded it. I have not even found a page on any of their websites that specifies when the caps are off so the consumer can set their system updates and/or download managers. Windows Vista users are guaranteed to smash into the FAP face first. Than the only way to find out is to play their Indian telephone game show of Jeopardy where they tell you the answers and you have to guess the question. But they claim this to be tech support. Be prepared to get frustrated by a guy who just learned English and is totally convinced he answered your question even though he hasn't. I learned if they won't pass you up the tech support chain to someone else, you can hang up on them and call right back and sometimes you can luck out, about 1 in 3 odds you will get the none mentally challenged tech support guy.
Anyways, I tell people when I find out that they are interested in this service that they need to exhaust every other possibility before getting satellite service. It is expensive and over priced. The marketing is misleading. The specs and boundaries are not clearly marked. And the tech support is miserable.
One last thing... Before the FAP and even now within the un-cap time periods... I really don't notice much drop in performance on bandwidth. Even though if you think about it, everyone now that is on the service is clambering over the few hours they toss us to download everything at once that would normally be peppered through out the day. If what they were saying about Fair Access was the truth about being necessary, we should see MASSIVE speed decreases in the times where the FAP is lifted. It just isn't so. Purely I think this was a move in hopes that they could try and over sell their service. Which hasn't come about as GSM/CDMA cellular internet, WiFi and the other services pulling more and more of the slack that was their nitch market. I highly doubt that there is any need for FAP other than to milk what few customers they have left for their over priced bandwidth caps.
Wifi is half mile away and fiber optic is now 4 miles away from my house. In the next year I will be most likely yet another dropped customer from their service.
This company REALLY needs to rethink their strategy.

In response to Mainly for Lori

I had the Elite Pro plan, which, in theory, allows 500 MB before being FAPed. I NEVER watched any streaming video or movies, yet found myself being FAPed after Microsoft updates, when trying to download PDF files and during normal web browsing. Youtube was out of the question. After installing a handy usage measuring tool, I discovered that I was being FAPed at well under 200 MB of actual usage. Maybe you were getting my excess bandwidth? :)
I had Hughes.net for two years. Despite upgrading, service has gotten progressively slower, outages are frequent (several times a day, minimum) customer service is rude, confusing and downright weird. Calling them is pretty much pointless. Being able to discountinue this service is a great relief.

Update: More Ripoff / Extended Contract? $300 Cancelation Fee? Huh? You're Kidding!

Well, I'm back!
Sorry for not answering any questions, I hadn't visited here in a long while.
Most of the questions and comments are right on target. No need to add anything.
DSL is now available in my area! "Whoo hoo!"
I decided to try it out.
I emailed Hughes to let them know I would be canceling in a week.
The email I got back claimed I would be charged a early cancelation fee of $300!
My service contract was for 2 years. After that, there is no "contract". (so I was led to believe)
My service began in Mar. 2006.
Now approaching Mar. 2009, that makes 3 years.
Ah, but 15 months ago, I got a package from UPS. It was a new upgraded modem from Hughes.net. The paperwork said it was a free upgrade, no charge. Just a system overhaul/update. (again, so I was led to believe) They didn't even want the old unit back.
Now, 15 months later, they claim that the upgrade reset my contract @ 2 more years, putting me under contract for 9 more months!
Wow!
I was told nothing of the "extended" contract. I had no choice in the upgrade, it was manditory.
Sound criminal to you?
Me, too!
Well, I expected as much from these guys, so I'm just gonna have to change my CC to keep from having to dispute the charge and going through all that mess.
I'm glad I contacted them first because I figured they'd try to stick me with a bill (somehow) if I tried to cancel.
I swear, you really need to watch out for this company.
In the three years I've had the service, I've paid out over $3100 to them. Never missed a payment (automatic CC payment).
Thanks Hughes!
I won't be back!

Mainly for Lori

I've had HughesNet for about 4 months now and while the FAP can be a pain, not to mention the $70 a month i pay for their 1 Meg service, I'm very satisfied with it.

I'm pretty much in the same boat as your sister. Charter stops 1/2 mile down the road and won't run it to me and AT&T has no foreseeable plans to give me DSL.

I tried using Alltel's service but since broadband cellular is not available in Benzie County, i had disastrous results, oftentimes slower than dial-up.

On the subject of the FAP, I was well aware of it BEFORE i signed up. I can't claim that the info was available to everyone who signed up before that, but it was available at HughesNet's website when i joined.

The download threshhold varies from plan to plan. I have their mid level plan and the download threshhold is 375 MB. If i hit that in 24 hours, I'm shut down to anywhere from 1 kbps to 20 kbps for the next 24 hours.

Anytime you go to a website, a small amount of data is downloaded. If, while at that website, you go to another page, a small amount of data is downloaded.
You could surf the web all day long and never even come close to the threshhold.
If your sister downloads music, assuming the usual song file is 3500 kb, you could download 100 songs in a day and still not hit your threshhold, although if you're doing alot of web surfing you'd want to throttle down the amount of songs somewhat.

The ONLY time i've been throttled down was while downloading movies. Anything else is extremely minor. I watch all the youtube videos i want. Even my live stat tracker for my fantasy sports teams is so minimal it doesn't hurt me at all

Something that some people don't realize is that from 3 AM to 6 AM is go crazy time. There are no threshhold requirements during that time. It's a pain, but when i'm downloading movies, i'll start a download, pause it, get up at 3 AM (like i said, it's a pain, but doable), resume the download and pause it again at 6 AM.
If your sister is set up to receive automatic downloads from Windows or her anti-virus and such, she could set it up so her automatic downloads start during that time

At 375 MB, i can't see how anyone would EVER break the download threshhold unless they're downloading movies.

When your sister signs up, if she does, she can monitor her status at HughesNet's website. They tell you exactly how many MB's you've downloaded for each indivdual hour.

The speed does throttle down during peak times due to shared bandwidth, but it's not too bad. I usually connect anywhere from 350 to 650 kbps during peak times.

Being a northern Michigan roofer, i had alot of time off this winter. During that time i spent hours and hours online, talking on the sports boards i'm a member of, constantly working on my yahoo fantasy team, checking player news at rotoworld....I'd browse the web sometimes for 8 hours straight and never had a problem other than downloading movies. Once i got used to how the threshhold works, I learned to adapt my movie downloading.

Sorry for the long winded post but alot of the messages i read in this thread were pretty misleading as far as I'm concerned. Your sister should definitely explore all options before going with HughesNet, but if the other options fail, then HughesNet is definitely the way to go over dial-up

Final Update: Hughes Relents! / Says "Good-Bye"...but not "Thank You"!

Just a little tail end of the story...

Embarq delayed hooking me up to DSL due to speed limitations. They worked on it for 4 weeks, but no go. I settled for 768(?) speed (the best they could give me for now) and will have full 1.5 speed soon (I hope).
I went without service for a month because I had canceled Hughes service.
Wow! Toxic Shock! (I'm firmly addicted, so I've found)

Just to make clear....
I called AND emailed Hughes to inform them of my canceling date (March 12).
No email response, but the guy in India told me:
#1. I would have to pay a $300 early cut off fee.
#2. would have to call back on March 12th to officially cut off the service.

Today (April 28), I got an email from Hughes.
It read:

Subject: Unsubscription success notice
"Dear clay,
Your order with Order Number 2425XX has been unsubscribed."

Customer Service is a joke with these people and they assuredly will go out of business in the near future. They missed the golden rule.
"Do unto others...."

downloading

Lori,

I can see you have some misunderstandings about what "downloading" is with hughesnet.

It is not JUST downloading pictures, videos, or pdf's to SAVE to your computer. Just visiting webpages counts as downloading. Just "watching" an internet video or "listening" to interent radio really racks up the megabites downloaded. You don't have to save them to your computer for them to count against you.

As a matter of fact just the satalites communication with the dish by being online uses up a tiny bit of your available megabites.

Then when you hit the max the system becomes about 80% useless.

The new FAP disclosure was VERY misleading. They proudly announced the FAP was being changed to 200 megs. Before it was 175 megs. BUT you have to click on their link to get the full story. It used to be 175 megs that restarted after 4 hours. now you get 200 megs but it restarts after 24 hours.

If ANYTHING else is available, use it instead of hughesnet.

More Update: NCO is now calling me 3-4 times a day.

Lucky me! NCO is gonna be handling my collections!

I'm feel like dancing a jig!

" ? ? ? ? ? "

Great thought

Unfortunately, there is no cable OR dsl service available to my sister. She has 2 choices, dialup (painful) and satelite. I have broadband, and honestly, I wouldn't trade it for the world. We also have cable, in this area it's far more cost effective and reliable. For my sister, her choices are very limited. Tried to sign her up for dsl last month, only to be told that she could get the long distance service, but would have to wait to see if she was 'chosen' by the company to receive dsl. HUH? They get to choose who pays them money for a service? How nice. Thats the reason we're currently looking into the satelite. Are we limited to Hughes, or is there competition out there????

Time To Switch

Guess it is time to switch from satellite internet to Cable Broadband Internet. I've had Direct TV for 7+ years and Love it , cable too Expensive for TV, BUT I get my Internet From Comcast Cable -Broadband Internet , No Download Limits, Basic Package up to 6 MBPS Download Speed AND ONLY PAY $46.00 A Month I dont want DSL either cause even best package for DSL is Slower than Broadband Cable. I have had broadband even longer than Direct TV & wont switch from either one. Just My 2 Cents !!!

My sister is looking into this service

So I'd really appreciate some more information. Do they throttle your signal if you're simply surfing, or are you talking about actively downloading content from the web? Does this happen when you are interacting with websites? My sister has 6 children, three of whom would be using the net in addition to herself, so any information you can provide would be greatly appreciated!!

Alternatives to HughesNet

There are alternatives to satellite and after finding out the hard way, I'd rather do anything (including dial-up) than pay a fortune for satellite internet. Call all the internet providers in the area (even broadband) and they will tell you if there are any other alternatives. You may be able to go with microwave internet if there are any towers near her home. Microwave is faster, more reliable and much cheaper to install but the monthly fees are usually higher than satellite. In my opinion, the best alternative to satellite is the phone cards you plug into your pc. Verizon has an Air Card and Sprint has one too. The great thing about it is there is no installation at all. You just need to get decent cell phone service and plug the card into your pc. It's super fast and you can use it anywhere you get cell service. It's only $59/mo if you use the same cell service or $79 if you don't. The only drawback is that if you want to use more than one pc at a time you have to buy extra cards. Although, the Sprint model has a wireless hub that you can buy to run several pc's at once.

HughesNet Download Limit

I was told by HughesNet customer support that the limit was 175MegaBytes of download per day. This is because they are on a shared bandwidth system. I have not seen this information on any of their paperwork and only found out after calling customer support about 30 times and I had one day that I had 200Mb of download so they thought that was why it was so slow that day.

Good Idea

Never thought of that, Thank You! I've seen commercials, but never made the connection to a home PC. I'll be researching this one today.

Again, Thanks!!

Hughesnet is dishonest in billing practices as well.

I have many complaints about this company. Besides the peak hour 4-11pm slow down/outage problems, the FAP, (and no it doesn't take much. I am a 50 year old grandma who reads email, some forums, and looks at recipes) I attempted to download a *small* design program for a kitchen, and not only did it not complete the download, (and I had to pay for the program) they told me to do it at 3:00am. It was a nightmare, long story short, I ended up paying twice and going over twice.

Then, in February, they update/upgrade the email. I stopped receiving ANY mail, could send mail, but not receive. Every night, I'm talking to India people named *Joe, Sam, or Bob* (really) They don't figure it out. I spent uncounted hours with this bunch of idiots. Finally, after 12 case numbers, they get me to advanced technical and an American/English speaking gentleman. He guided me through the back door of their email, and low and behold, THEY had been FORWARDING ALL my email to a HUGHESNET EMPLOYEE!!! For EIGHT WEEKS! THAT is one of the reasons I had to pay for the design program twice, because I couldn't receive the authorization code! I had to get another account through MSN to get email. And, they never apologized, never sent my emails, (just deleted them, according to him) never rectified the inconvenience in any way.

Forward to May. I do not participate in auto billing for security reasons. I normally pay over phone, and I also pay $5 a month extra for that *priviledge*. So, in April, I'm paying bills, can't get a live person at Hughesnet in billing to make a payment. I held for 30 minutes three seperate times that day. So, I logged on, and made a ONE TIME PAYMENT with my new credit card. Yesterday, I see where they deducted $171.58 from my checking account! After calling, "so sorry, that is the way it is, if you pay online, it automatically enrolls you in auto drafting". What? And, why the DOUBLE charge? Because I had never enrolled, changed my debit card number, and they were assuring themselves that I wouldn't change again? What the heck? I belong to a Credit Union that unfortunately is too cautious and we get new cards probably three times a year. It's a pain, but if I auto billed, they would get an insufficient debit if I hadn't called to change the card in time. SO, I asked them to refund my account, NO WAY! They can refund the one extra month that they took UNAUTHORIZED, but it will take THIRTY DAYS!

If I could get ANY other type internet service, I would in a heartbeat. We don't get cell service inside our home, no DSL, too rural, does ANyone know of any other satellite provider? There can be NONE worse than this! Or does anyone know how I can force the issue with this company?

Screwed up my email for over a month, stole from me, not to mention the SORRIEST service known to man! We have Directv and have no problems with that satellite service, so the satellite wouldn't be an issue in our area!

Thanks for listening, and any suggestions anyone may have!

Susie