Just my recent experience.

We were on Excede (sp?) for almost 2 years. Service got worse and worse, price rose. Constant issues with customer service, no resolutions - unplug modem blah blah, we'll be needing you to unplug your modem, have you unplugged your modem? Internet sucked, customer service sucked, the worst.

Switched to Hughes Net Gen 5, flawless for a few months now and around $75 less a month. Faster, never a reset, totally reliable with amazing customer service (we did go with the business plan). Fast uploads, streaming capable, good times.

Just our experience, yours may vary.

we took Excede to small claims and got our money back. they settled the day before court.

Just found this forum in hopes to find a better solution to my own similar problems with mountain internet. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a good proper solution right now, but I do have a workaround for personal use. That workaround is Boost Mobile. Forgive me if I sound like an advertisement, but they have a $50 unlimited everything plan ($45 if you use auto-pay). Pair that with an application for Android called PDANet+ and you can tether your phone to your computer via USB and take advantage of the lack of a data limit and much, much higher speed than any ISP currently up here. Only little caveat is that it is limited to just the one device you decide to plug it into. That's fine for me as I spend much of my off time at my computer doing work, but for people just looking to watch something like Netflix on their TV or use it throughout the household, I don't see this working well as Boost only has an 8GB mobile hotspot (Separate from the USB tether).

This might work better with some other mobile carrier too, I don't know. I haven't had much luck in the past with other carriers and trying to get service up here.

(Boost Mobile goes through Sprint's towers)


Not really sure why it thinks it was 1am on the 29th for that test, apparently Shadow Mountain has its own time zone. Has its own weather though, that's for sure.

(For comparison, my current home net on a very random server for some reason)

Too bad it's not Verizon. This was taken in Evergreen. Their hot spot feature is free on some plans. Cheap to add on others. Although only a few of us still have true unlimited data grandfathered plans with no caps. The new "unlimited" plans cap 4g hotspot service after 10gb.

Then again some may need to couple their service with a signal booster.

Nice. I've tried Verizon up at my place, didn't want to work with me.

It's also unfortunate that other types of "unlimited" cap off altogether at about 100gb, never being truly unlimited. That's why I actually made the switch from Virgin Mobile to Boost Mobile. Despite both being under Sprint, only Boost has proper unlimited. I've used nearly 800gb this month with no hiccups. Also, the wireless hotspot is indeed free with the plan but caps at 8gb. So that part isn't unlimited despite the actual phone's internet being limitless.

Waiting to see if I can use NETEO to replace Rise.

We have Exede and recently upgraded our service with a new box that points to their new satellite. CL refused to transfer our DSL connection when we moved 1/4 mile some years ago, and also refused to allow the people that bought our house to connect, saying the box is over subscribed. Interesting information on Hughsnet, they were awful a few years ago.

Speedtest statistics this morning: PING ms 629 DOWNLOAD Mbps 53.45 UPLOAD Mbps 1.10. I work from home, use Cisco VPS for all my server connections and corporate e-mail with no issues. I don't upload that much, so the 1MPS speed doesn't bother me any.

Neteo works well where it works, we have two neighbors that can see their repeater, but our house can't.

Best of luck finding a solution that works for you.

JTD, what plan are you on with Exede. It seems their monthly data caps would limit ability to do work via VPN or other RDP type protocols as they are typically always pinging to keep the tunnel alive.

I've always been told satellite will not support VPN's or VOIP traffic. The monthly caps have so far kept me from all the satellite vendors.

Blessings,

I have multiple company clients that use Skype, WebEx and Citrix for daily video and voice conference calls, and I also have a VOIP phone within our company network that runs through Skype and plays on my headset. Before we upgraded the box I had latency issues at times, so if that happened I switched over to my land line and called the 800# with my portable phone on speaker while the video ran on my laptop. I don't really have that problem anymore, but if it is going to storm, I will go down to town and jump on the wireless at Starbucks if needed. In a previous job I used Zoom and Slack video and voice conferencing and chat, again over Satellite internet, and it worked mostly well with a few latency issues.

I use multiple VPN and secure connection clients for my work, and have not had issues with connections being dropped or refused due to latency, which was not the case 4-5 years ago. This has given me the ability to work from my home office most of the time, unless I am doing traffic intensive scanning work, where I will go to the company office in the DTC and use the corporate network.

Again, this is my situation and solution, your experience may be entirely different. We have a close neighbor that tried Hughsnet and it failed for him doing mostly the same thing, but they are able to see the Neto tower and use that successfully.

Thank you JTD, for all the info. Good to know.