TEOTWAWKI Doomstead is in the hills on the far end of a rural
county, more than a mile (rough and rocky access 'road' with a creek
to ford) back into the woods. Forget about cable, fiber, or even
passable cell signal out here. We do have a line from the old phone
company, and have been able to get the ragged edge of a DSL
connection. But, since Windstream bought out the local co-op,
maintenance hasn't been a thing. I can only patch the brittle,
aging copper wires and corroding junction boxes together for just so
long myself. And we were paying way too much for under 5Mbps at
best, when it worked at all.
So we finally decided to try the only alternative there is for
us. Satellite Internet. Despite the horrific reputation it has
online...
The Deceptions!
One of the complaints I often read about Satellite is that the
companies (all both of them) lie to get people to buy... There's
some truth to this. But I have to wonder if the complainers are
"new" or something. In my day, we were educated young by comic book
ads for X-Ray Specs and Sea Monkeys. Advertisers have been known to
stretch the truth just a bit! The pretty lady in the Satellite
commercial has like 30 seconds to get you interested. She's gonna
keep it simple and positive, but not entirely honest!
"FAST SPEEDS"... Well, I suppose they're fast relative to
dial-up or a bad DSL. But not really anything to brag-on in the
world of cable, fiber, 4G, etc. Folks just a few miles closer into
town are supposed to be able to get DSL with twice Hughesnet
Satellite's advertised speed.
"UNLIMITED DATA"... Hughesnet is fibbing pretty bad with this
one. They don't cut you off or charge you extra if you overshoot
your monthly data cap, but they do throttle your access speed down
to under 3Mbps for the rest of the month. ViaSat is a little harder
to pin-down. But they will also throttle your service for a while
if their algorithm determines you are using too much data too
quickly.
"STREAM VIDEO"... Some. But you're gonna need the super-premium
package to stream HD NetFlix, Hulu, or whatever for binge-watching.
Even then, you'll be astonished how quickly you burn through your
data.
"ALL THE THINGS YOU LOVE ON THE INTERNET"... Unless you love real-time gaming, sensitive content (to the degree that you need a
VPN), or using your home WiFi as a hotspot for your cellphones.
Latency (the delay created by the time it takes your signal to make
the side-trip to a satellite 25,000 miles away) makes these things
difficult to impossible.
"AFFORDABLE PRICE"... Well, compared to paying to have enough
infrastructure privately installed to reach good Internet hard wire,
it's affordable. But it's more money for less value than any other
broadband on the market, subscription-wise. (Especially if you
remember to include the equipment rental!)
Funny thing is, five to ten minutes reading the Hughesnet website
would have consumers forewarned of all this. They give a pretty
good estimate of how much you can do with a gigabyte of data. They
admit that latency ruins gaming, screws-up VPNs, and makes
cellphone-through-WiFi a mess. You just have to scroll down the
page a bit. Go to the FAQs.
Instead, people chat with a rep on the phone... Forgetting that
these are SALESPEOPLE. They are paid to get you to order the
service, not to talk you out of it! Most of them don't even use
Satellite themselves. They probably aren't intentionally lying when
they tell you that you can do games, HD video binging, etc. They're
just guessing that you can, because they figure that's just regular
Internet stuff!
I read the site. Knew about the confessed shortcomings. Ordered
it anyway. 'Cause I'm getting too damned old, and have too much
else to do, to be spending days Tarzanning around in the trees
re-stringing broken telecom lines!
Installation.
Because Satellite Internet requires transmitting as well as
receiving, you're not legally allowed to self-install like you can
with Satellite TV. But there's no way that the Satellite Internet
companies, with only a little over a million subscribers apiece,
spread-out over the hemisphere, can maintain a fleet of trucks and
crews to do installation and service. So they have to rely on
independent contractors. (Some of whom then rely on
sub-contractors!)
So the folks who show up to mount your dish and set-up your
router are a mixed bag. Lots of horror stories about obnoxious
installers who left a mess and / or did a lousy installation. (Even
though
HughesNet and
ViaSat both have detailed installation
standards and requirements, with photo verification and
post-surveys.)
The lad they sent 'round to do our set-up was polite, knew his
job, and got it done well and efficiently. He was driving an old,
somewhat battered pickup truck, which is really for the best
considering the kinds of places that need
HughesNet Residential. I
would've felt bad if he'd had to drive a shiny, new vehicle through
the rough brush and rocky, rutted path that we call a driveway.
I suspect a lot of the complaints about Satellite Internet have
to do with poor installation. It's difficult to hold on a target at
25,000 miles! The dish may get a good signal through trees in the
Winter, then lose it when they fill with leaves in the Spring. A
dish mounted to a shaky structure isn't going to have consistent
reception. Even a fairly solid wooden structure may swell and
shrink with the weather and throw your alignment off.
Performance.
Only six weeks in at this writing, so just getting a feel for
this Buck Rogers tech...
Speed... I've been checking regularly, and I usually get the
advertised 25Mbps or better from
HughesNet with proper, long-format
tests. The more common quick tests indicate how erratic the speed
is though. Ranging from 2 to 50Mbps from one moment to the next.
Latency / ping is so high that some tests can't even measure it
correctly.
Reliability... Severe storms have taken us offline a couple of
times so far. (Naturally the weather goes to Hell in a handbasket
the week after I get the dish.) Both times, the system came back
online when the weather started to let-up. Other than that, the
connection has been constant.
Ease of use... At the user end, it's your basic broadband
router. Four Ethernet ports and WiFi. You can access the modem's
internal software through your browser to see current satellite
signal strength, remaining plan data, etc.
Basic Internet Functions... Email, web browsing, research,
message boards, social media, private messages, online shopping,
etc. All these pretty much work normally.
Video streaming... I don't know about
NetFlix, Hulu, or the rest
of the subscription services. (We get
Gunsmoke and
Svengoogie via
an old-fashioned antenna. Who needs anything else?) Other Internet
videos work, but can be a bit tricky.
Video servers usually check your connection speed, use an
algorithm to decide what resolution to send you, at which data rate,
with what amount of buffer. At the same time it's doing this, the
video page is sending you advertisements, annotations, suggested
videos (with thumbnails and maybe previews), and the comments
section. With the satellite latency and erratic transfer speed
making this a bad case of cyber-hiccups, the server often gets
confused and sticks you in the super-slow lane with repeated
buffering.
An ad blocker helps. I pause the video immediately, then
switch off annotations, manually set the resolution to SD
(480), scroll down a bit to load the comments, let the suggested
videos thumbnails load... By this point the video should have a bit
of buffer loaded, and should play well when I resume it.
Maybe.
Uploading... No problems so-far. Much faster than the DSL was
on its best day.
Downloading... No matter how fast your connection speed, you can
only download as fast as the servers will feed you the file.
Downloading from a monolithic host has been very fast. Downloading
from any sort of torrent/P2P type server tends to be horribly slow.
I suspect this is due to the satellite latency slowing down the
ever-switching connections involved, bottlenecking the flow. Still
looking for a workaround.
VoIP... Saying "goodbye" to
Windstream also meant losing our
land-line phone. With no cell service back here, we would have to
rely on phone via Internet. Due to the connection switching latency,
this has known issues with Satellite. Both Satellite providers have
their own VoIP services that are supposed to be optimized for the
purpose. But we're trying the third party VoIP we already had,
which costs well under half as much.
Aside from the inevitable lag, it works well with outgoing
calls. But it doesn't ring-through for incoming. Those go to
voicemail/email. Need to check with
VoIPly to see if they have
a fix on their end.
Data... I was in for a surprise when we started. I knew we were
being frugal, but the needle on our 'fuel gauge' not only didn't go
down quickly, it seemed to be going back up now and then!
Turns out this wasn't a delusion. Although they don't
promise/advertise it, HughesNet seems to give new users a 20 day
breaking-in period during which data consumption doesn't count. Now
that this is over, I see that the plan data is being consumed at a
rate that will probably have us run out of data before the end of
the month this time around. Then we'll see how much of a handicap
the throttled speed is, and whether the throttle is lifted during
the bonus hours.
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-30-
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