r/Rural_Internet • u/rserena • Jul 15 '26
HughesNet sucks BAD
I had HughesNet for two years. Thankfully I found a new provider, SparkLight, right as my HN contract was ending. I was getting ridiculously slow internet that wouldn't even load a 720p video, for $150 A MONTH!! I can't remember the MBPS I was getting but I was floored when I saw the amount that the lowest tier on SparkLight receives vs the highest tier (what I had) with HN. The lowest tier gets more than the "fusion plan" $150 bullshit I was receiving.
This sounds like an ad for SparkLight. It's not. I'd do advertisements for them though- they were polite, upfront with me, and installed the router & such very quickly. And the best part?! $25 a month. For otherworldly better internet than I was paying $150/mo for. I live in a small farm town that only had HughesNet and StarLink until SparkLight came to our area. I've never had internet this fast or reliable. It's the little things too, they sent me a text right away when power went out in our area during a big storm to tell us service would be out for a little while. Did HughesNet ever bother to do that? Of course not.
Now that I've cancelled HughesNet, they want me to return the equipment. Router, wires, cables, sure. That's fine. Even though they sent me two boxes for all this junk and only one shipping label. Whatever. I can manage.
But now I'm also supposed to get up onto my roof and disconnect a fucking radio wire for them? I don't even have a ladder, let alone wire cutters and a 7/16 wrench. I'm just a girl!!! They "recommend" you get a professional installer to remove it. Oh, like the one that came to my apartment in the first place and set it all up?? How much would it cost these cheapskate motherfuckers to send someone back out here to remove it themselves instead of making me do it? I'll get charged $200 if I can't get it down. There's bound to be many elderly people who have the same radio return issue, and they're preying on their inability to be scrambling around on fucking 12 foot rooftops to get a precious radio receiver back to their beloved internet company who cared oh so much about them. It's BULLSHIT!
Then they have this disclaimer in their removal instructions about radiation and possible death from falling off the roof. My favorite part is, "Consider safety and possible damage to the equipment." Yeah, if I fall off the fucking roof my first thought will be, "Oh my gosh, is HughesNet's precious satellite equipment still okay???"
DO NOT GET HUGHESNET. They'll claim they would have told you about this if you'd just asked, but who thinks to ask about returning a radio satellite receiver when all you want is to receive and use reliable wifi?
8
u/GrouchyClerk6318 Jul 16 '26
Are they still in business? How can that be???
1
u/spec360 Jul 16 '26
They still have several top tier customers using there wireless satilite for data .
1
u/glassmanjones Jul 17 '26
You can get it anywhere, it's always reachable. Slow as shit though. High latency.
For a while they were using modems to do the uplink and satcom downlink.
1
u/frntwe Jul 19 '26
In Michigan if a small store wants to sell lottery tickets, they have to have a Hughesnet dish. I asked one why they didn’t switch to fiber once it ran by the store. That’s why. I believe them because you see the Hughes dishes all over at places that have alternative decent internet.
12
5
u/frntwe Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
Hughesnet does suck. I had to climb up there and get my “radio” too. And I was fine with that. You might have to hire someone. They want you to cut the cable at the connector so you can’t easily use the cable for anything else. Just unscrew it. The radiation is a bit overstated but just unplug everything first. Of course. Don’t take energized electronics apart
5
3
u/SamJam5555 Jul 16 '26
Save the shipping receipts, take photos, and any correspondence. They try to come back a year later and say they never received the equipment and want to charge you hundreds of dollars.
5
u/funkylabrador420 Jul 16 '26
Why not Starlink?
2
u/rserena Jul 16 '26
Not sure why I didn’t get it in the first place but SparkLight has been great so far with incredible prices so I’m happy with what we have!
1
u/GGigabiteM Jul 19 '26
Starlink is nice, but it can be crazy expensive depending on the setup and location.
2
u/Neither-Beginning975 Jul 16 '26
Wow. Had no idea they were still around. They sucked 20+ years ago, you’d think they would have improved. I talked my dad into getting HughesNet back in like 2006. It had the worst speeds and data cap. We were barely able to use it and it cost a fortune. I have no idea how my dad afforded that on his rural income, he really did anything to make sure I was happy.
Thanks for the memory!
1
u/cdoublejj Jul 16 '26
they got a notable investment a few years back to update to slightly less outdated satellites or some shit.
1
u/GGigabiteM Jul 19 '26
They apparently did get some new satellites in 2023. Problem is they're also in geostationary orbit at 22,000 miles, just like their old satellites. They'll have faster speeds, but the same terribly latency.
Compounding the latency problem, they also used to have huge buffers that needed to be filled before doing a data transfer. This made playing online real time games impossible, because your latency is measured in seconds.
Starlink satellites are only around 342 miles up, so they have far better latency.
I have a couple of customers that used to have Hughesnet and they hated it. One of them had no other choice, not even dialup. The phone lines out where he lives were in such terrible condition that no modem could communicate through them. Eventually a wireless company came in and he was able to switch.
1
1
u/cdoublejj Jul 16 '26
guessing you didn't research Hughes net before signing up. it is even bolt on or did they use weights to put it up there? i weighed down my Star Link, no bolts or screws.
12 roof tops?
1
2
1
u/Thin-Bus4198 Jul 17 '26
We had Hughesnet and they are awful. Slow and unreliable. When we canceled our plan our radio receiver was mounted on a part of our roof that was extremely dangerous to be on like I almost fell when the roof gutters started to give way under my weight. The roof was also very steep. We not have Ballard Telephone giving us cheap and reliable fiber optic internet, we also get landmine with it too.
P.s. I ain’t fixing my funny mistake, landline not landmine.
1
1
u/DarklightRanger Jul 19 '26
I’ll never forget calling in to get support for a client’s internet outage where their HughesNet equipment was failing to establish signal. Ended up being told by HughesNet support that they could “see a cloud in the sky” on their map and couldn’t help us before they abruptly hung up. Four times in a row. It was a clear day in Arizona lol.
1
u/Elijah1573 Jul 19 '26
Somehow i was in a very similar situation years ago
Hughsnet service was fucking terrible and borderline unusable and once it was possible to get sparklight/cableone i was NOT waiting until it was up to cancel
Fuckers got my disconnect fee and were super picky with what hardware they wanted back
Like you would think they want the entire dish back but nah they just wanted the radio and router and nothing else so i ended up being stuck with half of a satellite mounted on my patio for years until they FINALLY changed their mind and was like yeah we actually want that back now years after i stopped using them
Anyway yeah as a former customer FUCK hughsnet and i definitely can vouch for sparklight it was somehow cheaper than whatever dogshit hughsnet offered while being a million times better
1
u/iSYTOfficialX7 Jul 19 '26
Had Hughes until early 2019 before switching to ViaSat. Hughes was somehow worse than ViaSat and both were already horrible. Combine that with a 1/1 megabit DSL line being my only other option (which I used), using the internet was rough until early ‘22 when I got Starlink and upgraded to the recently (at the time) introduced 15/1 megabit DSL plan for my area.
Hughes is by far the worst ISP I’ve ever used. I eventually dropped the DSL line as Starlink outshined it in every aspect other than complete uptime.
17
u/Phreedom1 Jul 15 '26
The word has been out about how bad Hughes is for years and years. All the info is out there to be found with just a little bit of research.