Have you seen all the commercials advertising Hughesnet? Don't believe their hype! Unfortunately if you live in a very rural area your internet choices are going to be very limited. In my case it is either satellite internet or slow dial up that is also long distance. You will choose a service package upon sign up. That package will determine your daily usage rate i.e 250 MB, 350 MB, or 450 MB for residential services. If you go over your daily usage allowance your service will be slowed for 24 hours. Hughesnet now has a way of checking your download usage. Checking your download allowance status will show you exactly how much you have left for the day and how many hours until your daily allowance refills. You also have a free period, in the middle of the night, when downloads do not count towards your daily usage. Keep in mind it is very easy to go over your limit - image heavy pages, especially with a lot of gif files will quickly eat into your limit, as will videos, streaming music, and certain online games (second life, wow, etc). As long as you keep an eye on your allowance status and space things out it isn't too much of a problem. Unless you are big into games like second life or wow - those will be far to laggy to enjoy. I have not had that problem with minecraft, but anything that is very rich in graphics will lag. Skype and other VOIP are hit or miss, sometimes they will work great and sometimes the lag makes them impossible to use. Overall I would not recommend Hughesnet or any other satellite internet to anyone. As soon as anything else becomes available we will be dropping hughesnet. For now though it is all that is available and if you are in a similar situation then compared to other satellite providers hughesnet is not so bad. When you go over your daily limit you are only penalized and slowed down for 24 hours - some other companies penalize you for the rest of the month. But if you have other options go for them. Do not fall for hughesnet's claims of fast, reliable service - you will be disappointed!
I'm in a rural area and I haven't even been able to sign up for internet services because of the lack of reliable providers. There is no way I'm paying close to 80$ a month for internet that isn't reliable. My option around here is KNology. And I really don't like the daily limit either for this particular service. What a pain in the butt. I would much rather not have the net at home if I'm not going to get a good product! Thanks for the review!
