Satellite Internet

[Wind_River]

Does anyone out there have real life experience with Hughesnet or Dishnet? I would be interested in RV or home usage. Are these reliable and as fast as advertised? We do not have access to cable at home and the phone company is super slow.

[Trackrig]

2oldman wrote:
Hughesnet post

Verizon coverage is so good now, unless you're camping in a canyon I don't see why you'd need this.

I find this funny. I live in the east side of Anchorage and can't get through on either of our Verizon phones half of the time. Then when I do, 50% of the calls are dropped. Internet on the phones is very slow.

Just recently did the east coast of the States and Verizon didn't work near as well as they do out West. AT&T was somewhat better, but still poor. You couldn't walk around while talking and if you tried your mail, you should have a book in the other hand to read. Very disappointed in both carriers back east.

Having said that, I think they'll be better than a satellite connection.

Bill

[DutchmenSport]

We we moved into our current house about 9 years ago, there was no internet available. Over the phone lines or cable systems were non existent as our home was in a small pocketed area in Madison County, Indiana, where AT&T and other providers and such cannot not come into because of monopoly laws.

We didn't realize this until after we purchased the hosue. So we decided to try HugnesNet. First, it cost over $100 a month (just for internet only). Second, there was too much lag time in the responses. For example, playing on-line games, our responses were always behind, and to put it simply, we were blown out of the game.

Because of the lag response time, we looked for any other alternative, which we found in our area that uses a line of sight from cell tower to cell tower, not microwave, but something like that. Worked very well, and have been using it ever since.

Meanwhile, canceling the HughesNet account and getting our money back and their equipment returned took months and months. They billed us for equipment we returned, because the returned equipment got lost (which they eventually found after more months that went by). Not to mention how horrible their phone service was, going through, Push this number for this and push that number for that, and spending hours (yes... HOURS... waiting to talk to a real person). Sign up was very easy, canceling was the worst night mare we ever experienced!

But finally, we got everything straightened out. And we've been much happier with our line-of-site system now, plus, it's much, much cheaper and works much better.

Bottom line, if you do not do "gaming" but pretty much things like on-line banking, and checking emails, it will work pretty good for you. But if you do streaming videos or anything that demands "real time", the lag with your response will drive you nuts.

Maybe they've improved in the last 9 years, I don't know. All I know is, I'll NEVER use HughesNet again. Never!

We also use our cell phone hot spots, not at home, but when camping! This works MUCH MUCH better than Hughes Net ever did!

[2oldman]

Hughesnet post

Verizon coverage is so good now, unless you're camping in a canyon I don't see why you'd need this.

[RFCN2]

We used Hughes for the first five years we had our current motorhome which has a Motosat dish on the top. The service in our motorhome worked but was slow and expensive. The reason I stopped using it was Verizon cell phone wifi got so good almost everywhere that it was better for RV travel than sat dish.

On the other hand sat internet at a fixed location should work fine, but it will always have a latency issue vs land based systems. This is another word for reaction time.