Complaint Review: Hughes.net Internet Service

I have been a Hughes.net user since 8/22/06 in that time I have experienced the absolute lowest, most useless, most uncooperative tech support that it has ever been my misfortune to experience. I am an electronics tech with over 45 years experience both in circuit level troubleshooting and IT. I do not need a flow chart reader to tell me that my system is fine when I can't access the internet. I have had trouble with the Hughes.net system from the very beginning. On two occasions they have sent me new modems unnecessarily because they simply were too incompetent to isolate the actual problems. Before you contact tech support with this company you had better first have a couple of good stiff drinks and take a few valium. You will get a very pleasant sounding person with such a thick East Indian accent that if you have poor hearing as I do, you will only catch one word in ten. Then the first thing they will do is have you reset your modem, in the process clearing any diagnostic data it has stored. Of course in most cases clearing the modem gets you going again for at least few minutes, so then they can find no problem and simply apologize for any inconvenience you have experienced and tell you to call again if you keep having trouble. Of course when you do call again you will just go through the same endless loop. It is like an insidious "Mobius Strip" The greatest problem is that after you have wasted often an hour or more on the phone and hung up, ten minutes later the problem will often re-occur. I have actually had to reset the modem as many as a hundred times just to get my email, but they continue to say the system is fine. In one case I logged the error codes that the modem was reporting for over a week. It tallied over 26 different error codes in that time. Armed with that data I called again the next time the system quit and before resetting it. The first thing they did again was demand I reset the modem before they would run any diagnostics, and as they would not budge from that I finally did. As soon as it came back up working they simply told me that since it was presently not showing any problem there was nothing they could do. When I tried to give them the error codes they told me that at their level of support they did not deal with the codes and refused to connect me to a higher level because the system had responded to a reset.
In one particular incident about six months ago I went through this insane run-around for nearly three weeks, being told at every call that there was no problem. Finally one day I called in and upon describing the problem was immediately transferred to higher level support who told me that the problem was a router problem at their end in the network operations center and that they were already aware of it and assured me that their engineers would have it fixed within a few hours. IT TOOK ANOTHER THREE WEEKS! Then to really make it frustrating I had to argue with their billing department for a half hour to get just one months credit on my bill.
Now the final straw. The system has been only marginally useful since then with it becoming slower with time. This last week I have been trying to do some very large downloads of data that I need to get soon. Finally I hopes of getting a bit more speed and a little higher limit on their so called "fair access policy" (frankly that is a total joke, it should read unfair access policy") I spoke to their tech support and then the billing office who both assured me that going to the next higher service package would definitely improve my speed as well as adding 75mb to my FAP limit. Once they had me suckered into spending the extra money they told me the system would be down for an hour while the computers updated my equipment. After much more than an hour when it was still down I called their tech support. They walked me through a re-registration of the modem and said it would then work. Well it did not! In point of fact what they had done was transfer my system to a transponder that was completely non functional. They actually had a pre-recorded message on the tech support line before you could speak to anyone that plainly stated that customers on that particular transponder would not be able to access the internet for some time due to network operations center problems, and that their engineers would have if fixed shortly. I called them and demanded that they switch me back to the transponder I had been on, and they flatly refused. They said that it was their policy not to move anyone to a different transponder unless the signal strength was below 52%. It was just a few points above that at the time. The fact that they had switched me from a transponder with a 94% and fully functional only minutes before did not seem to mean a thing to them. When the person I was speaking to became rude about it, I demanded to speak to his supervisor. He flatly refused to transfer me to the supervisor! I then asked for his name and employee number so I could file a complaint. He gave me his first name only and said his employee number was classified. It is not! It is mandatory that he give that information if asked since without it there is no way to register a complaint. A first name is useless; there could be a hundred Randy's working for Hughes. I finally got him to transfer me to billing to cancel my service. The lady there said that she would definitely get it straightened out, and that they did not want to lose a customer, but that I would have to contact tech support to change the transponder. After jotting down the case number she gave me, I again called tech support, this time I got a different person who again refused to change it back, and if possible became even more belligerent and rude than Randy had been. I have now signed up with Wild Blue. I hope they will be a bit more realistic. In the meantime while I wait for them to install their equipment, the dead Hughes.net transponder finally came back online about 24 hours later, unfortunately it is displaying exactly the same symptoms as occurred six months ago when it took their network engineers 3 weeks to realize they had a problem and another 3 to get it right.

Les
Squires, Missouri
U.S.A.