Our Hughesnet hands-on testing
We signed up for Hughesnet to see how our experience compared to the providers’ claims and the experiences of customers we surveyed. The installation process was smooth and the installers did an excellent job (Hughesnet works with local contractors, so your experience may vary). We signed up for a 75 GB satellite-only plan and got to work seeing what it was capable of doing.
Testing Hughesnet speeds
Right away, we wanted to test the connection’s 25 Mbps download speed. We started with various online speed tests, which gave us a wide range of results, some notably higher than the advertised 25 Mbps. Of course, we wanted to see these results in action, and Hughesnet provides an app that makes it easy to track your connection’s data usage throughout the month.
Most video services suggest 25 Mbps as the minimum recommended speed for 4K video, so we found a video that offered 4K resolution on YouTube and started watching. YouTube will try to reduce your video resolution when it encounters buffering problems, even if you explicitly set the resolution in the video settings, so we used a browser plug-in to maintain consistent 4K resolution throughout the playback of the video.
We found that our connection couldn’t maintain playback on a 4K video and had to buffer extensively after each individual frame. In fact, it struggled almost as much with HD video, and without the plugin, YouTube would typically downscale the video to either 720p or 480p, which can get by on speeds below 3 Mbps.
We streamed 4K video over our Hughesnet connection for 12 hours a day until we had used up all our monthly data. This took us 19 days to use 75 GB of data, with an average of between 3.75 GB and 4.5 GB being used per day. This translates to between 43 and 45 minutes worth of video over a 12-hour period. Not exactly an ideal viewing experience.
What happens when you run out of data?
One of our biggest questions in this test was what would happen after we exceeded our data cap. Would we still have at least a semi-functional internet connection or would our speeds grind to a halt? After running out of data, we got much lower results on speed tests, though the difference was not as extreme as we expected. Similarly to before, there was a lot of variability depending on which speed test we used, but a few things stood out:
- Speeds without data were slower than those with data across the board.
- Speed test results were still higher than our estimated average speeds.
- Speeds were higher in the morning and lower in the evening
The good news is that the drop off in speed isn’t as harsh as with some providers. Rather than capping your speed at some arbitrary point, it seems that your traffic is simply deprioritized, giving you slightly higher speeds during off hours and lower speeds during high-demand hours. The bad news is that regardless of what goes on behind the scenes, what you’re left with is a really slow connection.
Despite performing noticeably worse on speed tests, the difference over the course of the day seemed fairly negligible . Although we couldn’t measure the exact amount of data we were using, since the app just listed our remaining data at zero, over the course of 12 hours, we were able to get through about 43 minutes of 4K video, which is on par with what we were able to do before our data ran out. Despite Hughesnet’s pricing scheme is focused around the amount of data you want to buy, data didn’t really seem to matter much in the long run.
Testing Hughesnet Data Tokens
Purchasing Hughesnet Data Tokens is a very easy process. The Hughesnet app prompts you as soon as your data for the month starts running low, and you can purchase tokens in the app. Any purchased tokens are added to that month’s bill, so you don’t need to have a credit card ready or make an additional payment.
As soon as we added data tokens to our account, our speed test results jumped up to where they’d been before and all leftover data from the tokens carried over to the next month. Data from data tokens is listed separately from your monthly data in the app, so had we run out our data for a second month in a row, we would have already had extra high-speed data ready to go.
Hughesnet testing takeaways
The biggest takeaway from our Hughesnet testing is that although Hughesnet connections seem capable of reaching that 25 Mbps download speed, the average speed we experienced was much lower, which makes many online activities outside the reach of Hughesnet customers.
The silver lining to these lower than expected speeds is that you might be able to get by with less data than you would normally expect. Normally we strongly suggest choosing plans with higher data caps because it’s really easy to burn through hundreds of gigabytes in a single weekend, even at satellite speeds. With Hughesnet, it took a huge amount of effort just to burn through 75 GB in less than a month, so it’s hard to imagine normal customers using more than 50 GB of data on a regular basis.
We haven’t yet tested Hughesnet’s Fusion plans, so we don’t know what impact the added reliability that comes from a second network would have on average download speeds, but our experience was that satellite-only plans definitely struggle to deliver consistent broadband speeds.
It’s also worth mentioning that according to our latest customer satisfaction survey, most Hughesnet customers reported “always” or “usually” getting their advertised speeds, so your experience may vary. Since online speed tests give wildly different results for satellite connections, it can be hard to know if you’re getting the speeds you’re paying for or not. Satellite performance can also vary by location, so it is also possible that our location was an outlier, but in any case, our connection definitely underperformed our expectations.
