Hughesnet

[SlowModem]

Does anyone here use or has anyone here ever used Hughesnet for internet?  I've been considering it and there's all kinds of horror stories if you google it.  Are there any satisfied customers out there?

[WeatherHost]

In your situation, any satellite service will be the same.  As long as you stay below the FAP threshold, you'll be fine.  If you go above, some will throttle your speeds back to dial-up, others will tack on overage charges.  Read the FAP conditions thoroughly.

With Starband, I had a rolling 7 day 1Gb limit or about 135Mb per day average.  As long as I stayed below 1Gb in any 7 day period, I had good speeds.  If I went over, I was throttled until I fell below 750Mb.

Service itself was fine, but they started jacking the prices up later on.  I was grandfathered into a program that is no longer offered, so my rate was frozen.

Weather was the biggest issue.  Heavy clouds overhead blocked the signal and ice/snow on the dish would do the same.

You might also look into Exede: 

http://www.exede.com/

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-18438_7-57361444-82/exede-the-satellite-broadband-service-youve-been-waiting-for/

We had Hughes at work when they were DirecWay before we got a wireless local ISP and never really had any major problems.

[jay_hoehn]

I had Hughesnet for about 5 years until my local phone company installed DSL to the box about a mile from the house.  It worked very well for me except if you are trying to use the internet from about 2:00 pm to 8:00 pm.  Then the speed was really deprecated.  It still worked but was much slower than their advertised speeds. Their excuse was that was the time that most people were using the satellite and it was too busy to handle the bandwidth.  I only a problem with the FAP threshold once and that was when I got a new computer and needed to download all the MS updates.

For the most part I was happy with the service.  But I am glad I can have DSL now.

Hope this helps,

Jay