Hughesnet Good Riddance Hughesnet! The WORST company EVER Germantown, Maryland

Today was one of the happiest days of my life.
Why you ask?
Because today was the day I was finally able to cancel my service to Hughesnet!
In case you are considering getting Hughesnet, here are some things to consider.

*Be ready to pay $400+ up front for the purchase of the equipment or an extra $20-$30 every month if you decide to rent the equipment instead. You are locked into a minimum 2 year contract no matter what option you choose. I went with the purchase option, I should have taken it as sign of things to come when after shelling out $400 I was told by the installer that I would have to purchase a poll for an additional $100 to mount the dish on, because Hughesnet no longer permitted them to mount the dishes directly to a residence. Well after I shelled out $100 more for a poll that, for such a price, should have been plated in gold, but looked like any $10 poll that they sell in any hardware store, I was already $500 in the hole for a service I hadn't used yet.

*The lowest monthly plan hughesnet offers is $59 a month (or was when I signed up two years ago), unless you want service that is only marginally better than dialup with a very limited download allowance you will have to go with a minimum of the $99 plan (which is more like $115 a month after taxes and fees). God forbid you went with the rental option, then you are looking at $150 a month...

*For around $100 bucks a month you would expect a good connection. Think again. The service is so overloaded that during peak hours the speed is only marginally better than dialup. Trying to watch a video on youtube is an excercise in frustration. The satelite uplink is also subject to random resets, which drops you offline and takes anywhere from 5 minutes to 1/2 hour to come back online. Forget online games such as World of Warcraft, the nature of Satellite Internet makes such games nearly unplayable due to lag from the signal having to travel 24,000 miles to the satellite and back.

*And don't think about watching too many videos on youtube. Your download allowance is fixed at 300-500MB(depends on plan) which is less than 1/2 hour of videos or a normal size download. Once the download allowance is exceeded you are stuck at dialup speeds for 24 hours, unless you purchase extra download allowance time at the not-so-low price of $10 for a reset.

*The worst customer service I have ever experienced! I signed up for the direct pay option. Some months the payment would correctly come off my debit card. Other months, for no apparent reason, they would make no attempt to collect their payment. Then, all of sudden, the service would "lock me out" and redirect me to the Hughesnet billing system for payment. Fine, I'll pay it through the system, I thought. Well, no dice. Their online payment system doesn't work! So I'm being forceable redirected to a payment system that won't let me make a payment! Then I would spend several days trying to get ahold of a live person (they must have 5 reps for the entire country) all they time without internet. Then when I finally would get through to a service rep that could barely speak english, they would treat me rudely and when I would ask why the money wasn't taken out of my account, they would just respond that they didn't know and didn't handle direct pay. No apologies, no offers to credit my lost days, nothing.

So there you have it, my experience with Hughesnet. Over $3000 spent over the course of my two year contract for a service only marginally better than I could have gotten by paying $10 a month for dial-up. Luckily, the phone company started offering DSL in my rural area. So I signed up as soon as my contract was up with Hughesnet. It is less than 1/3 the monthly cost of Hughesnet and the service is much faster. Good Riddance Hughesnet!