Hi, everyone. I'm posting this in regards to a problem that a family member is having with Wildblue internet.
They got WB last August for their house, at which no cable or DSL is available. They are on the 1.5 mbps down plan, I think it's $89.99 or so.
The problem is that it seems to be very slow, but inconsistently slow. Sometimes it works fine, you can run a bandwidth test and get a full 1.5 mbps, other times it seems to slow right to a crawl. But it happens very quickly - you could have a good connection for 30 seconds and then an awful one for a minute. Very short bursts.
When they first got the service, it was nothing short of terrible. The connection was very intermittent - you couldn't surf the internet practically. Even downloading emails was tough. They had the installer back out, who did a bunch of things. He changed the head on the dish, and verified that it had good signal. He installed some kind of optimizer software, and tweaked a bunch of network settings. That may have helped some, but it didn't seem to do much. He then called WB and they placed the account on the top of some sort of priority list, giving them greater access or something, and the speed shot way up. Got much better than it was.
Well, that didn't seem to solve it. If it did, it didn't last too long. The connection is still intermittent - not as bad as it was before, but not great. Downloading emails can sometimes take awhile, and surfing is still intermittent. The connection is completely useless for other web-based devices, such as the IP thermostat they're trying to use.
They're going to call WB back out again and see what they can do. The dish seems peaked properly. There's about 75 feet of cable between the dish and the modem - it's solid copper core RG6 that the installer provided. One dual ground block and two barrel connectors also provided by the installer - they are both in good condition. So that doesn't seem like an issue. We've tried bypassing the router and going directly to the modem and that doesn't help, so it's not a LAN problem.
The modem has not been replaced, but the tech didn't find anything he thought was wrong with it. Could it be something that WB is doing to allocate connections?
I don't know which satellite the dish is pointing at, but it's in the same general direction as the Dish 500 pointing at 110/119.
Should it work better than this? I understand satellite internet isn't perfect - there's latency and stuff, but surely it should be better than this. Unfortunately they are too far away for cable/DSL to ever be practical, and there's no Clearwire or wireless broadband available either. There's always Verizon or AT&T stuff, but that's even more expensive. If we can't get this solved, is HughesNet any better?
They got WB last August for their house, at which no cable or DSL is available. They are on the 1.5 mbps down plan, I think it's $89.99 or so.
The problem is that it seems to be very slow, but inconsistently slow. Sometimes it works fine, you can run a bandwidth test and get a full 1.5 mbps, other times it seems to slow right to a crawl. But it happens very quickly - you could have a good connection for 30 seconds and then an awful one for a minute. Very short bursts.
When they first got the service, it was nothing short of terrible. The connection was very intermittent - you couldn't surf the internet practically. Even downloading emails was tough. They had the installer back out, who did a bunch of things. He changed the head on the dish, and verified that it had good signal. He installed some kind of optimizer software, and tweaked a bunch of network settings. That may have helped some, but it didn't seem to do much. He then called WB and they placed the account on the top of some sort of priority list, giving them greater access or something, and the speed shot way up. Got much better than it was.
Well, that didn't seem to solve it. If it did, it didn't last too long. The connection is still intermittent - not as bad as it was before, but not great. Downloading emails can sometimes take awhile, and surfing is still intermittent. The connection is completely useless for other web-based devices, such as the IP thermostat they're trying to use.
They're going to call WB back out again and see what they can do. The dish seems peaked properly. There's about 75 feet of cable between the dish and the modem - it's solid copper core RG6 that the installer provided. One dual ground block and two barrel connectors also provided by the installer - they are both in good condition. So that doesn't seem like an issue. We've tried bypassing the router and going directly to the modem and that doesn't help, so it's not a LAN problem.
The modem has not been replaced, but the tech didn't find anything he thought was wrong with it. Could it be something that WB is doing to allocate connections?
I don't know which satellite the dish is pointing at, but it's in the same general direction as the Dish 500 pointing at 110/119.
Should it work better than this? I understand satellite internet isn't perfect - there's latency and stuff, but surely it should be better than this. Unfortunately they are too far away for cable/DSL to ever be practical, and there's no Clearwire or wireless broadband available either. There's always Verizon or AT&T stuff, but that's even more expensive. If we can't get this solved, is HughesNet any better?
