Complaint Review: HughesNet

We moved to a house that only got satellite internet, so we thought, we called to have Hughesnet installed and were told that it would be $47/mo with a ONE year contract. I asked how fast it was and they told me that if it wasn't sufficient it would only cost $99 to cancel the service.

First, it is so slow that I CAN NOT send pictures in my emails. My husband can load a youtube video on his 3G iPhone and watch it before the computer can even load the page. You can not stream video at all so Netflix is out of the question. Facebook will hardly load and when it does you can not play ANY games or watch the linked videos or anything.

Then for Christmas our boys got iTunes cards so my one son bought Diary of a Whimpy Kid... approximate download time on Hughesnet? 37 hours. Ya I said thirty seven. So it started downloading and after only 2 hours it stopped and we got an error message saying we had exceeded our bandwidth for the day. So I called and was told that between the hours of 1AM and 5AM you can download all you want, but all other times you are limited... obviously limited so much that you can't download a simple movie off of iTunes. So for over 17 days I stayed up until 1AM to start the download for this one stupid movie for my son. It took 17 days because there were days that I had gone to bed and the internet 'lost connection' and stopped the download. Grrrr.

So, along with all this, we get the second bill that was for $60 instead of $47 so I called and got a supervisor who said that he found the problem and had fixed it.All was fine for another couple months when my account (btw, they auto debit my account which I never authorized) and they had charged me $77 so I called again and was told that the $47 was only good for 3 months and that I had a two year contract not a one year contract and that it would cost $368 to cancel my account. When I asked for a supervisor I kept getting the same thing. So I asked to be transferred to someone who could do something about it and they said they couldn't.

I said "so let me get this straight... you have an American reel me in, and American explain and have me sign the contract and an American come out to install and once I sign and am hooked I now get someone overseas who can't do anything about it and can not ever talk to another American again?" and then man said "yes, unfortunately that is the case"... He said that he has two options, the billing and cancellation department are in the Philippines and the tech dept is in India. Seriously???

So... bye bye Hughes net... it is worth the $300+ to get rid of you!  Word to the wise... stay away from this company! Hughesnet internet is not only slow but they do not honor their contracts at all.