Hughes Network Systems LLC

It took two weeks and four calls to get someone to come out and adjust the angle of my satelite. I have been with this company for several years and now hear nothing but complaints. The first two people I spoke with exhibited poor communication and technical skills. After two tries I reached a person who understood my situation and scheduled an appointment a week later. At that time I had been without Internet access for almost a month. An additional week and 5 minutes on my roof solved the problem. This was not a first for me with the customer service group at Hughsnet. Be very careful with this company.

For those of you wondering about Hughes Net, avoid it if you can. Yesterday I spent more than five hours on the phone first with another country; who by the way have you hang up and call back with a case number because they "claim they can't transfer the call". At that point you start being put on hold with a voice counting down the time it will take your call to be answered; 40 minutes later you get to go through the same process, which you must repeat 2 more times until you reach Tier 3. Tier 3 can give you no further information than the main Hughes net office mailing address which you can find at any stock market quote about the company. The commitment term is huge and the monthly rates are so high; for us there is no buying our way out. As to speed, ours is comparable to our old dial-up. It took more than 20 minutes to find the company address and post this message. I didn't file a complaint with the WV Attorney General, I did however ask his office to look into this company's commitment length. But I believe the best thing to do give a truthful account of my personal experience here to warn other potential shoppers of this company's actions to its own paying customers. Besides here, the company can't buddy or buy my review away. :-) Their parent company is Echo Star (which also owns Dish Network) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echostar. My problem was downloading a game with bonus chapters, during real "hours" instead of the free download time available when vampires roam after 2 am. Oh please, is it cheaper for them force customers to download penalty free in the middle of the night? Also if you have problems and you will; they only cover to the modem. So unless you can afford to pay for a modem at each computer in your house; be aware the coverage for Hughes Net stops at the router to the other devises. I was told to have someone to my home is $125.00 to start with other charges pending....Fun....you bet. Should you be like me and go over the limit and need to use a "token" to reset your bad, horrible self, for violating the tiny limits; do not sign in! You will be unable to find anything about tokens. On the page where you check you bill status before you sign in; go to the lower right of the screen under tools to find the link to redeem the tokens yourself and avoid this lovely "process". Should the very first gentleman in another country had been honest and said, "Yes, you are right. You are over the limit this is how to fix it." He instead insisted I was not over my download limit and we should run tests on my machine; nope, learned that lesson with Microsoft long ago...they can run the test they want from their end; (trust me, because they have to if you use a router) that progressed to and jump here to this web address and then the recalling the same phone number with a new eight digit number and on and on...unhuh. Five hours I'll never get back; thanks so much, Hughes Network Systems, LLC , for your deceptive TV advertising on downloading, huge monthly pricing plans, unrealistically long commitment plans, your non-responsible and unethical employees and most of all your very poor customer service policies.

I was searching for a tile installer specialist, not someone who does a variety of several constructions. He started on time finished on time and addressed all my concerns. I was very happy with his work & the outcome.

For those of us in the boonies there aren't a lot of choices for broadband. In fact there really is only one choice if you are beyond the reach of cable services and are too far from a central office for DSL: satellite. And when it comes to providers of satellite service there are even fewer choices. At the time there were two for us: Wild Blue Communications and Hughes Network Systems (Hughes Satellite). We had a friend who had Hughes and after doing a bit of on line research we decided Hughes was the lesser of two evils. While I'm grateful for having broadband (after 4 years on dial up at another rural location, I was ready to get back to having a page load faster than "get a cup of coffee then come back" speed), I'm not excited about how the service works or with the limits that they put on you. It was a bit painful at first, too. We had some trouble with the way the satellite was calibrated causing some outages and slow load times. The customer service is all off-shore until you get the case escalated to the third level. It took a couple of weeks to get it fixed. Then I started hitting the Fair Access Policy (FAP) limits which put my speed back to dial up. Basically what this is is that depending on your service plan (more money more bandwidth) you have a specific amount of download that can occur over a 24 hour period. If you go over it then you get punished with dial up speed. Another 24 hours (if you don't try downloading big items again during that period) you get your broadband back. I hit FAP quite a bit at first but began monitoring my usage more and haven't hit it as much lately. It is very frustrating. You do get some free time, however, during the hours of 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. Download without worry. Just make sure you have a download tool or you won't be getting any sleep. What seems really unfair about this policy is that the web is moving toward more bandwidth heavy sites: youtube, streaming audio, streaming video, video on demand, gaming, etc. while companies like Hughes limits you to a few youtube videos or you will be put in the corner. Another item of note is the time of day you use the internet has an affect on how fast you will be cruising. For instance, at peak times (mid morning and late afternoon/early evening) you will experience a slowdown on your speeds because more people are using the satellites at this time. Again, I'm happy to have broadband again, but there are some tradeoffs and limits on its use with Hughes and it is the most expensive of options if you have others available. Obviously for us it is our only choice.