HughesNet Customer Reviews

If more than one person is using Wifi here, it blows. We have to go to an inconvenient area of our house, where the HughesNet monitor is, unplug everything, wait a minute, plug everything back in, wait approximately 5 minutes, then get back online and try again, just one person at a time. It's not an unlimited service. It's more than $100 for 50 Gigs per month. Upload speed is really slow. Download speed is average. Not much of a choice when you need to get your internet via a satellite dish. :(

Satellite internet is all that's available in our area and truthfully it's better than nothing. We do a lot of video streaming and usually use our allotted usage in two days, then our speed is cut from 30 Mbps to around 1 Mbps. I can't understand why there's a 95 per cent drop in speed, to me it's just their legal way of saying unlimited usage. I wish they weren't allowed to drop speeds over 60 or 75 per cent. Oh, you can get tokens to increase your speed, but you have to pay out your nose. I could live with 10 Mbps or even 5 Mbps, but 1 Mbps to 1.5 Mbps is ridiculous. It will have to do until something better comes along and when it does, I'm out of here!

Right out the gate, let me say that HughesNet gets the job done. I'm in between major areas out in the country, and I have internet. That's about as positive as I'll get. The main issue I have with them is the data cap. My wife and I pay ~$90 a month enjoy high speed internet for at best 20 days out of the month. After that, we have reached our data cap are throttled down to 120kbs. This is fine for the two times a day I check my email, but beyond that, it is simply not good enough to browse the internet with any semblance of efficiency. The other issue is the ping rate. My ping is well over a second making online gaming, formerly my hobby when I lived in an area with good internet, nigh impossible. That can't be helped due to the speed of light and the fact that satellites are hundreds of miles in the sky, but it is one more reason why I say that if I had another choice, I would NEVER choose HughesNet. I gave the Customer Service a 3 because I haven't used it, so maybe it's fine. I gave their speed a 2 because it's adequate for half the month, but the ping is awful. Reliability would be higher were it not for the crippling data cap. Value would be a zero if there were an option, so go ahead an pretend I put zero. I would not exchange money for this service if I had another choice. It's literally worth no dollars.

On an average, we have a ping rate of 845-125ms, a download rate of 20-10mbps, and an upload rate of 4-5mbps. It works really well about three days a month. There are two people in our home, no gamers, and only evening/ weekend occasional streaming as we have DirecTV. We use our cell phone data plans as suggested by HughesNet support to avoid data usage. We are also locked into a 2 year contract, so that is cool. To get out of the contract we must pay $587 dollars. When we inquired about cancelling we found out we have a home phone line we are paying them for too. Not sure what the number is and why we have it but we are paying for it.

I was worried about HughesNet reading the poor reviews. I've had it a little over two weeks, through some of the worst weather in memory, and it has been steady. No breaks in service. Speeds consistently around 20-25 Mbps and most importantly, everything has been constant. Recommended if it's your best option. One million times better than AT&T DSL.

Overall the service works pretty well, but we run out of data generally within the first week of the month and are then stuck with the slower speed which makes it impossible to watch any online videos. Web surfing becomes fairly painful as well and email is about the only thing that functions ok after reaching your data limit. I upped the data limit to 30 GB a month and it lasts a bit longer but still generally run out of data by the two week point. I was told that 20 GB was plenty for an average family. My kids don’t even play online games and we still run out of data. We don’t stream any movies because we never have enough data. The equipment works well but the price for the service is ridiculous. $70 a month for basically one week, maybe 10 days of usable internet each month.

You are set a certain limit and once you meet that limit, it will slow down to the speed of the old days of broadband.

Always works unless there is bad weather. If you use lots of social media or watch a lot of videos you will most always run out of data. When you do, web pages and email still works well normally. Token packages are available for additional data in a variety of price ranges.

The only upside I've found with HughesNet is that I almost never lose service except during the worst thunderstorms. They are slow. They have ridiculous data caps 20 GB a month for $150. If I didn't live in a valley surrounded by trees I would use absolutely anything else. Their customer service is poor to put it lightly. I have had to hang up and call back several times because I couldn't understand the person I was talking to. If you have any option other than satellite internet go with that. Once my contract is up I'm going back to dial up.

The good news, if you use HughesNet between 2am and 8am you could be pleased with their service. The bad news, during peak usage hours of 6pm and 11pm, you will be very frustrated as either they throttle speed to 1.6 Mbps (nowhere near 25 Mbps advertised) or the Gen 5 satellite cannot handle the traffic congestion. I switched from another provider to HughesNet because my previous provider was so expensive. However the service was super fast. There are more choices for rural wireless internet coming every few months and I will be watching for a better internet service provider.

Polite words cannot describe satellite internet. Very weather dependent, does not support voice over IP, extreme data limitations. In some cases you will be happier with dial-up internet.

If I knew I would have to use & pay for HughesNet's modem/wi-fi Router and pay an additional fee to receive support, I would have never signed on! Other than that, HughesNet is a decent ISP.

I have been a Hughesnet subscriber since Gen3, and upgraded to Gen4 and Gen5 as they became available. I really can’t tell much difference in the speed of each Gen upgrade. For many years my data allowance was 10Gb and with one user in my household it lasted 2-3 weeks. There are now three users in my household, so I increased my data allowance to 20Gb.last year when I upgraded to Gen5. Well, the 20Gb lasts less than 2 weeks. That is not acceptable, especially when the speed is only marginally faster with data as opposed to without data.

HughesNet is okay for a satellite service but has the usual problems are data limits (just watching a few videos on Youtube will use up your monthly allowance) and of course it goes out during any rain or heavy clouds. Sure wish we could get DSL here in the Silver Lake Area!

I have had this company for close to 9 months and only on a few occasions has the speed reached even close to what they advertise. This of course only happened while on the phone with a representative as they worked to correct the speed. They have even changed out the router and the dish with no change in service quality. They also advertise "No Data Limits" even though they limit your data and once you reach that limit they limit the speed until the next billing cycle. Oddly enough the 1-3 Mbps Limit on speed is roughly the normal speed for this company anyhow. I am normally between 1 and 6 Mbps even at the beginning of a new cycle.

Great coverage, but my internet is gone within a couple days to two weeks tops. Lost my 20 GB of internet in 2 days and they said I used like. 35 GB on my bonus time. We never use the bonus time cause that's at 2am till 7am. Not happy!!

Needing to work from home as well as spending 2 days per week on home school assignments, it is near impossible to get work done without the internet service constantly buffering causing delays to uploading or downloading or frequent loss of work. Worst possible method to work from home. If trying to stream online games, music, or videos forget about it, unless you can download the content and play or watch later. Can't wait to switch to broadband/fiber as soon as it is available in my area.

Speed is useable and not too big of a problem until you run out of your allotted data for the month. We pay an awful lot of money to get a 75 GB/Mo. allowance. It's not enough for today's Internet usage norms. We run out within a week and a half after our allowance resets and spend the rest of the month limping along with the crippled speeds. I need the internet for work and this is really not acceptable. Unfortunately, it's the only option here.

Decent Internet with surprisingly fast download speeds albeit with high latencies. Pages and streaming very slow to get started but once they start, good speed is held. Upload speeds good enough, though slow. Due to high latency, VPN usage is almost useless.

Over priced and unreliable. When I signed up they didn't tell me there's a data cap of 50 GB and that's for the "gaming" package.

HughesNet is usually slow during the day and even slower after 5 pm. Fairly often my screen will freeze up and I'll have to reboot. With them, I feel like I'm back in the '90's when everyone was using land lines and if you had a big download you had to do it after midnight or it would stall and abort.

Expensive, terrible service. The only reason we use HughesNet is because we have no other option. It is not fast and they cap your download which makes it impossible to watch videos, movies or even update software. If you go over your limit you have to purchase tokens to be able to even load a simple webpage. The worst part is that we easily spend well over $100 a month!

I need a good internet. This one is limited, extremely slow and the signal is not good. I need to turn the power off several times a day to get the good speed...and have it work.

Supposed to be 25Mbps but it can't handle 2 cell phones. Can't always get internet radio stations. Keeps going out. Checked speed several times and one time the speed was less than 10Mbps.

I don't have much of a choice for internet where I am at. I'm very limited in data and speeds. I can deal with the slower speeds if they gave a reasonable amount of data. If I can find another isp that has better rates/plans I would switch in an instant

If you're looking to play online, it won't happen. The internet is fine, everything works on it but the latency (ping) its gonna be crazy bad which means you're gonna lag like crazy.

Unfortunately, they are the only provider in our area... they do not have an unlimited plan... and when it rains... the internet does not work. They recommended for us to wake up at 2 am and record movies to watch later. Would be great if they had other options.

HughesNet has never been able to provide me the guaranteed speeds on uploads. I used to get better than average download speeds of 12-20 Mbps. Of late, my download speeds are 2-3.8 Mbps with uploads speeds of 0.75 - 0.27 Mbps. I've called the company numerous times about my upload speeds, with no rectification. I've been sent to multi-layers of tech service where they can't solve the problem and send me off to someone else who has to get back to me. Of course, no one ever does. I've had a couple of outstanding employees try to help me but no one has been able to solve my problem. Now that I am getting below average download speeds as well, I'm looking for another carrier.

Better than dial up, but other than that, speed is not good, and high speed seems to elapse within a few weeks, even with limited use.

Only can buy 10GB data in this area. Download time so slow that one must wait until very late night to even to attempt to stream a video.

Signal strength is ok, but even on the highest data rate plan, we used our entire monthly data allowance in 2 days. No Netflix or on-demand movies were used. Find another option. Once you use your data for the month they throttle down your speed to a crawl.

I am very pleased with HughesNet except that we are limited to 15GB of daytime download per month. That's not nearly enough if you want to do more than email and browsing.

This provider is not recommended at all for anyone who actually wants to use their Internet for anything, it is literally faster to use an EDGE connection on your mobile device than to buy this service. At peak hours (2am-8am), this service gets as fast as 6Mbps download and .15mbs upload. My children would like to play on their consoles but even connecting directly to the modem won't allow them to connect to any online servers much less play the actual game. I have the best non-business plan and I still get only 50MB a month in data with another 50 during peak hours. They do not offer an unlimited package on data, so we run out halfway through the month, and since it's satellite, we can't get more, so our speed drops to about .15mbs download and .05 upload. They have a really nice customer service but they can't help. I really feel as though you'd be better off using unlimited mobile phone data with a mobile hotspot and they are about the same price, depending on your provider.

Hughesnet has a business model that is dependent on a captive audience that has no other option for Internet connections. Speed: Due to this, the company is allowed to provide speeds that are unusable for most services. The only thing a user could do is browse basic websites without media. Data Caps: Lower speeds would be passable if not for the issue of a data cap. The standard plan only offers 10GB a month for $60 which is comparable to a phone Internet provider. This cap makes it impossible to do anything online that a large majority of the population is able to do, video streaming, music streaming, voice/video calls, essentially anything that isn't black text on a white screen. They offer additional data from 2 am - 8 am but it is unreasonable to assume that anyone will be awake during that time. (Un) Reliability: An additional issue to account for is that the service will not be available during storms. Also the speed is never anywhere to what is quoted. (Currently measured at .11Mbps / quoted 1.5Mbps) Overall, avoid this company if at all possible. The same applies to all other satellite Internet companies due to identical business models.

The net speed could be a little faster. The data should be unlimited. Not turned down, and not turned back up for days after I pay for the highest for what i get. Always losing reception. Fades in and out. Even on a clear sunny day. Could use a check up from a tech.

We have had nothing but excellent internet service with HughesNet

If satellite Internet is all you can get where you can live, then I highly recommend HughesNet than any other!