Any expereince with WildBlue satellite internet?

[ShadowHawk]

Hello folks,

We're in process of making a move "out of the city" - to a little spot of land in the woods of East Texas. There's no cable there - so our high-speed internet options are pretty much limited to satellite internet services.

I'm looking for personal experiences with the choices for satellite internet services. I've found: Hughes Net, as well as WildBlue. HughesNet - I've seen an installation of - and the customer was never able to get 2 brands of an off-the-shelf wireless router to talk to the HughesNet system... So I'm not really keen on HughesNet.

Does anyone on-list have experience with WildBlue satellite internet? Any "gotchas" I need to watch for in their service? Any feedback on their limits of 15Gig/month DL limits plan? ($79.99) I'm paying that right now for unlimited internet through TimeWarner... but alas.. no cable where we're headed. (And that's probably a good thing!)

Thanks,
Rex "Hawk" S.

[beedeetee]

I personally use Hughesnet (4 years now) and have never had a problem with any wireless router. It just needs to DHCP an address from the modem. I signed up my MIL to use Wildblue. They were easy to work with and we never had any issues. After her death, it was pretty easy to work with them although they tried to bill for service after it had been canceled (along with a finance charge since the credit card that they were auto paying with was canceled). After I called to explain all of that it was all good.

[ShadowHawk]

Thanks for the info BeeDeeTee!

[NeuroBee]

The usage limits are tricky. It is a rolling 30 day average so if you go over your GB your speed is slowed until the 30 day average comes down.

[beedeetee]

Hughes is on a daily limit. You can see how much you are using. You can reset (double your daily limit) your limit for free once a month. They also sent me a notice a while back that there will be a system set up to let you bank your unused capacity. They said that they would roll it out to users over the "next few months", but I haven't seen it happen yet. You can all also pay $10 to reset your limit if you already used your free reset for the month. Also downloads from about 11:00pm to for the next few hours don't count (I don't remember the exact times), so you can schedule backups to start after that and download more.

[ShadowHawk]

Good to know. Do they have a utility that lets you know where you're at at any given time as far as DL's for the month?

[ArkansasBK]

If you ever start having proplems with Hughesnet you have to talk to and try to understand the support crew in India. I dealt with them for a full year with no success, Paid off my contract with them and had Wildblue installed.Going on a year with them and not a single problem. If I ever do, I will be talking to someone in the US that speaks english.

Wildblue's second level pkg (12000 MB of download and 5000 MB upload) is about the same cost as Hughesnet's Basic Package.

I love WildBlue and will stay with them.

Yes, both Wildblue and Hughesnet has usage status meters.

[beedeetee]

If you ever start having proplems with Hughesnet you have to talk to and try to understand the support crew in India.

I've never really had a problem with Hughesnet, but I did call them for some reason one time. Over a couple of days I talked with "Irene", "Betty" and "Joann". All with heavy Indian accents. Mostly they read from canned response cards.

[ArkansasBK]

I've never really had a problem with Hughesnet, but I did call them for some reason one time. Over a couple of days I talked with "Irene", "Betty" and "Joann". All with heavy Indian accents. Mostly they read from canned response cards.

Exactly, and all they really could tell you was "unplug your modem for 30 seconds and then replug"

My Hughesnet would go out for a week to ten days a month, sometimes twice a month. When it didn't come back after 3 weeks, I told them to come get their junk and went to Wildblue.