Wireless Internet Providers

[russellhltn]

however the issue we are seeing now is when the FHC is trying to download a large file such as a stored microfiche file from one of the paid sites the church uses, they are encountering issues where the downloads will stall or become painfully slow (even slower than the previous service provider's sometimes 2M download)

Does it start off ok and then slow down, or is it slow from the get-go? If it slows down, then I suspect that something somewhere along the line is de-prioritizing the traffic to make way for smaller data streams such as screen refreshes.

If it starts slow, then it might be the protocol is affected by the latency. One trick that used to be used (maybe still is), use satellite for download but a landline for upload. That cuts the latency in half.

You might try other speed tests. Perhaps downloads from other sites. ISPs are keenly aware that they're judged by speed tests, so they have tricks to make themselves look better than they really are.

[Mikerowaved]

...however the issue we are seeing now is when the FHC is trying to download a large file such as a stored microfiche file from one of the paid sites the church uses, they are encountering issues where the downloads will stall or become painfully slow (even slower than the previous service provider's sometimes 2M download) However- if during the download process we run a speed test from a separate computer (or my own laptop) from another point in the building, be it CAT-5 or wireless, we'll still see decent speeds on that speed test.

Don't know if this is the the same thing, but I had a WISP provider claim 30Mb/s DL speed, but buried in their terms it said this was for the first 10MB of a DL; after that, it slowed to 2Mb/s. Other PC's on the same LAN still had good speeds, except for the one with the large DL. I ended up using a DL manager that could stop and restart a DL where it left off thus resetting the speed, but stopping and restarting each DL multiple times was a pain.

BTW, as of today, DSLReports has received 167 good and 622 bad reviews on HughesNet. ConsumerAffairs has the following breakdown of "Overall Satisfaction Rating" for HughesNet:

6 - *****
3 - ****
5 - ***
8 - **
490 - *

Unfortunately, you just might be fighting a losing battle.

[RyanGard1977]

We ended up going back to our old provider- Rise Broadband. (Satellite dish type thing to antenna tower off in the distance) and all the issues we were having ceased. we had a bit of a battle with Hughes with them not wanting to live up to their guarantee and cancellation policy but in the end with some advise from church legal I believe- they were successful in getting hughes to play nice. The FHC is happy and we are happy as well. The speeds seem to have improved from previously 2m down to at times up to 15m down so not too bad. The lag that we were seeing with hughes is not present with rise. Rise is probably not going to be an option for most of you though. I think Hughes will be ok for single residence type use, but for multiple computers at a location trying to access at the same time- that seems to cause the biggest issues.