Tom M.

Be very careful of this companies' claims.

I had standard Verizon DSL service with very few other options in my rural neighborhood. My daughter was beginning to take college classes on line while also teaching violin on line so I wanted to see I could improve our system download/upload speeds. I communicated all this information to HughesNet upfront.

Based upon HughesNet claims it seemed possible for me to improve my speeds by 5 to 10X. Verizon held a steady 3 to 3.5 Mbps and HughesNet offered 25 Mbps and their price had dropped in line with other providers so I felt like I should give them a shot, even though many reviews were saying otherwise about their performance.

Unfortunately the negative reviews I read were correct. My service was installed, failed miserably that same day of installation. I called HughesNet who tried to reset some technical things over the phone and retest my system - still no improvement. They sent out a technician to replace the radio transmitter to attempt to improve the service. Technician said the over the phone technical people at HughesNet have no idea what they are talking about and he decided not to replace my radio transmitter. He did some tests and thought everything looked fine, but later the same day the service failed.

I called to cancel the service never even having used it. HughesNet customer service made me feel like they were doing me a favor by allowing me to cancel their awful service. They said they would send me a pre-paid UPS shipping box and that I was to return to them their equipment (router, power cord and radio transmitter on the satellite dish) or I would be charged $400 as an early termination fee. I had to get my son to climb up on our 2nd story roof to cut the radio transmitter from the satellite dish because they would not be sending anyone out to retrieve their equipment. The satellite dish is still attached to my roof.

My service was successfully terminated, but they would not reimburse me for the $99 install fee, and they charged me $37.10 for 12 days of usage (starting from my account start date until my cancellation call & approval date). I never even used their service during those 12 days, because thankfully I had kept my Verizon DSL service going during the transition period, just in case something went wrong - glad I did! The 12 days of service I ended up paying for was the time it took HughesNet to diagnose the problem, resend a technician, multiple lengthy phone calls, etc. all while I could never use their pathetic service.

I would never recommend this company for anything - sales, service, product or customer relations. This is not a righteous company and its eventual collapse is certain.

Tom McGonigal