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1. Potential subscribers to a satellite internet service should be aware that both Hughes and Wild Blue will limit your monthly data downloads. My experience with both these services was that after 7.5 Gb in a billing cycle they would limit my download speeds to little better than dial-up speeds. A single HD movie in addition to my usual modest surfing (no other video streaming, ever) would be enough to meet their threshold for slowdown.

2. HughesNet has long been the best. Their history is military and when they started offering civilian satty links they were the most reliable, and apparently still are, if a bit pricey for the data rates, but you pay for quality. When shooting azimuth and elevation, accuracy and signal strength increasingly matter the further north one is from standard orbit zones.

3. I tried a couple of Sat ISPs several years ago. I got so frustrated with the lag, I gave up on them. It made for a very frustrating process to wade through a lot of ebay listings. The downloads were fine, once they started and back then WildBlue didn’t have data limits. I gave them up and went with a local wireless company, their lowest speed is over 10mb/sec and the cost is much less than the sat systems. It also doesn’t wigg out when the weather gets bad.

4. Does HughesNet track your viewing habits or have ads that follow your IP surfing, like the other systems?

5. Once told a salesperson i lived so far out in the styx i couldnt get satellite service!

6. I’ve had 10 different ISPs over the years in 4 different states and HughesNet by far was the WORST provider of them all. The service was spotty, the download speeds at night and the weekends were almost as slow as dialup, and there are data caps which you blast through in minutes streaming even YouTube let alone Netflix or Amazon. What we ended up doing after having to use HughesNet for 6 months then pay their ridiculously high contract cancellation fee (yes, a two years contract – I got them down from $500 cancellation to $200 after complaining about the horrible service) was we switched to a local microwave internet company and man is it night an day difference. We have MUCH faster speeds, we can stream 3 Netflix movies at a time in HD, no data caps, no weather issues, and about 50 dollars cheaper per month. They brought a bucket truck and put the antenna 60 feet on a tree after limbing some of the branches. As long as they can get a line of site to their tower, even if it’s 10-20 miles away, you are good to go. I may have them come back and put in a 100ft tower they said they can do, that way I can use it for my ham radio antennas too, and I don’t have to worry about the tree falling or grow more branches.

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