HughesNet says: You're all too slow

It was a great day in the North woods when we laid our 56k dial up modem to rest and undertook the next phase of our Internet entrepreneurial experience, or so we thought. We took the plunge, shelled out half a grand and had HughesNet mount a satellite dish on our front deck. "This'll be great," I told my wife, "We'll finally be up to speed." Little did I know, at that milestone moment, that my blood pressure was going to rise much faster than my download speed has.

The installation went fine. The fellow was thorough and adept. With his independent contracting work I have no issue. The problem lies in the service I receive from my new ISP. Suffice it to say that I almost wish I had my dial-up connection back.

Since hooking up to HughesNet, I'm sorry to say, we fail to successfully complete 1 out of 3 page loads. Messages such as "The server is busy," and "The connection has timed out" have become all too familiar trade words.

At first I thought the situation was par for the course. I assumed that our ISP was outrunning the outlying servers. However, that notion quickly faded as I did a bit of further testing and experimentation. It is my conclusion that the problem is specific to HughesNet.