A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

The first thing people ask when I complain about my internet service is, “Why don’t you just go to another company?”

Out here on the mountain, there is no alternative but dial up, and every time I lament the horror of Hughesnet, know that dial up is even worse.

So, here is how Hughesnet sucks.

When I first moved out to the mountain, dial up was no big concern because I didn’t do much web surfing. I turned in all of my illustration work on disc or Fedex’ed it in.

Six years gone, almost no clients want original art, almost every editor wants previews via email, and the tanking economy has Fedex closing down pickup locations all over the country. We only had two day service anyway, but now if I want to get an assignment in, I lose a day’s work driving into and back from the city.

I took the plunge into the digital age awhile back and began taking digital art classes which required my downloading and uploading rather large files over the internet. It quickly became apparent that there would be no joy or success in life without faster internet service. My Earthlink representative said they could provide me with satellite hookup for a rather exorbitant fee, but the march of progress required I buy new boots for the journey.

I took the plunge and forked over the $1,000 (yes, you read that right) to get a satellite for my computer. There was dancing and singing, and we slew the fatted calf to celebrate.

The celebration lasted for about a year.

Last summer, I began to have weird blackouts on my system. I’d be reduced to uploads at snail speeds of 1 KB per second, which is slower than dial up. I called to complain, and got no help. Earthlink made many sympathetic noises, but admitted that they simply leased their internet through Hughesnet, and Hughesnet was the problem. Eventually, Earthlink ended their partnership with Hughesnet, so now Hughesnet handles my account.

Hughesnet repeatedly denied there was a problem and told me the speed situation must be weather-related, despite many cloudless days.

After some months of going back and forth, I finally found out that Hughesnet had come up with a new bandwidth limit policy, and my account was being put on restriction every time I went over the 500 MB per day limit. It would have been nice if this had been spelled out somewhere in the literature I had received explaining the service policy, but no. This new policy was enacted after I had signed up, and even though I was paying the same price, I was getting less service. I assumed this was because my account had been switched from one company to another. It’s not like I had a lot of choice in the matter.

Every time I uploaded a painting, I was going over my limit. Sometimes days passed before I was removed from restriction.

This made blogging and all other things internet-related problematic, and put a damper on my hopes of ditching my office TV service in favor of watching Hulu on my computer.

After more months of frustration, and a particularly difficult week-long upload series of disasters trying to get the 13 page Tori Amos: Comic Book Tattoo assignment in (each page was about 360 MB,) I had to learn to live a new way.

The Hughesnet bandwidth policy does not restrict usage between the hours of 2 AM and 6 AM. This makes for many a long day, and sort of blows that whole early to bed and early to rise farm life routine all to hell. I haven’t seen the sun rise in months and months unless I simply didn’t go to bed the previous day.

This is more of an inconvenience than anything else, and beats the heck out of blowing a deadline.

I thought the bandwidth problem was solved by this nocturnal habit, but no.

About six months ago, I began to notice weird outages every single day starting around 10AM to noon and lasting until 10PM.

I can get on the internet. I can look at my website. I can go to any website for which I have a direct address.

I cannot use my Apple email program. At all.

I cannot surf the internet. I can get to Google or Yahoo, but I cannot search. I get an error message.

I cannot upload with my Fetch program.

Sometimes I can go to my external email program, but half the time it fails.

If I check my superficial Hughesnet system status, it reads green.

A closer look reveals many errors, bad connections, transport problems and uplink queue problems, even when my overall status reads Go.

During peak hours, even if my bandwidth has not been exceeded, the system will automatically slow down and start restricting the amount of data it loads, creating uplink queue slow-downs. My entire internet accessibility is restricted for half a day every single day, regardless of how much bandwidth I use.

It gets better.

The other day I tried to upload some art to DC Comics’ server, and I got an over-bandwidth limit notice. According to Hughesnet, I had used almost 600 MB that day when I had only downloaded a 1.9 MB file, and uploaded two images of less than 2 MB.

I insisted I had not gone over my limit, but it is entirely possible that my system was automatically updating programs and I did not know it. Over the weekend, my MAC OS update used 800 MB, which put me way over my limit for days.

There was more bad news: the tech guy told me I no longer had a 500 MB limit. I now pay the same price for 375 MB.

The good news: Hughesnet now grants a once a month bandwidth reset, and they were able to put me back online right away. Cool. The tech guy walked me through the process and it is good to know that I can reset my bandwidth in an emergency.

Bad news: I went to the new tools site Hughesnet has for customers, and it says I don’t have 375 MB, the new limit for my customer plan is only 300 MB.

Ahem.

So, even their customer service guy doesn’t seem to know about the 200 MB slash in my limit.

Whatever.

Semi-good news: you can BUY more bandwidth as you need it. They now have a pay as you go token program, so if I absolutely positively have to get it uploaded today, I now can. For an extra fee.

Still cheaper and faster than running to Fedex.

The bottom line: I am paying the same price for 40% less service than I had two years ago. This kind of sucks.

Even though I am not on bandwidth restriction, I have daily slow-downs and restrictions with my service that do not seem to concern Hughesnet in the least. So, I am paying full price for 12 hours a day of limited service.

The new system tools they offer to help schedule downloads are not MAC friendly. More importantly, I am more concerned with uploads. I have found a couple of upload programs with timers I intend to try. If anyone has any suggestions, I am happy to hear (I’m on a MAC OS 10.5).

I am rather tired of staying up until 3 in the morning. Moreover, I have gone to bed while uploading, only to find there was a power outage or something during the night and had to do it all over again. Quite tedious.

I find I am not the only customer who is not entirely happy with Hughesnet.

I have no other alternative at this time.

There is not other disadvantage to country living, other than the absence of a very fine Macy’s and Saks. And because I shop less, I guess that’s not really a disadvantage.

Well, that is my tale of woe for today.