Things to Do When You Have Hughesnet

I hope some of you have been wondering where I've been. Allow me to enlighten you!

Since February of this year, when we moved to Western New York, we've had the scourge of internet providers. This lovely company is called Hughesnet, and they advertise amazing services on their television commercials. Speeds so much faster than dial-up. They even do this graphic thing that shows how much faster you can download a photo or an album than you can with dial-up.

We should have known that any company that compares itself to dial-up would be trouble.

There are a lot of things that the nice lady in the television commercial doesn't tell you about this "service." So, before I get into the list of things you can do with Hughesnet, let me explain to you some of the things you cannot do with Hughesnet.

Edit: In January of 2013, my (former) roommates switched from HughesNet to Exede satellite internet. For the purposes of this article, both HughesNet and Exede can be used interchangeably. With regards to internet providers, both of these are cut from the same cloth. Exede is noticeably faster than HughesNet, which just means you will run out of your daily allowance all the quicker.

The good news is that I no longer live in the country and I have a real internet provider - not one of those shady satellite companies.

• No streaming video. This means YouTube, Hulu, NetFlix and any other anything that you have to download.
• No online music services. Goodbye Spotify and Pandora. It was fun while it lasted.
• No downloading anything. You are allowed a specific amount of download megabytes per day and, if you exceed that number, you are pretty much shut down until such a time as they consider you having paid for your crimes.
• No online gaming. And I'm not just talking Call of Duty here, you won't even be able to play Farmville.
• No Skype. It uses too much of your download allowance to run.
• Aunt Mabel likes to send pictures of your family out in Idaho. I hope she's sending them snail mail, or you won't be seeing them.
• Is it raining or snowing? Is there a cloud in the sky nine towns over? Guess what? You won't be online. At all.
• Do you use the internet for work? If you do, you may want to consider AFLAC for back-up income.
• You know how your computer caches things so that pages won't take so long to load? Forget about that. Also, ads on websites kill your download allowance.

The bad thing is that I am really not exaggerating. In this day and age when information flies faster than we can even conceive of it, this company is charging users three to five times the price of DSL for sub-standard service. I won't even go into their shady business practices or making little old ladies climb ladders to get the dishes down when they finally get sick of the service and cancel.

Last Thursday, August 2, 2012, our service started degrading about 8PM. A call to Hughesnet promised us we would have a technician call us by Monday. Of course it didn't happen. Apparently it takes multiple calls to their outsourced customer service department to get anything done.

But.. there is hope. Verizon is working on their Fios service right down the hill!

In the meantime, if you are a multiple Hughesnet symptom sufferer as well, here are some things you can do when you have Hughesnet.

• You can watch your grass grow... while CNN.com is loading.
• You can paint your toenails three different colors while you're waiting for e-mail. If you use Gmail, you might as well paint your husband's toenails, too. It's going to be a while.
• You can write a snail mail letter and send it to Zanzibar. It will get there quicker than your e-mail will.
• You can lose lots of auctions on eBay, since trying to get your computer to log in so you can increase your max bid might take some time.
• You can connect with friends and family, especially if you still have a telephone. Smoke signals also work better than your internet connection.
• You can cook a pot of two-day chili. Just make sure you buy a recipe book in a real store.
• You can and will find out how well you can use curse words.
• You can feel depressed and left out when all of your friends are posting cool photos on Facebook and all you get is that sad little "X."

In closing, if you ever find yourself in a position where your only internet options are Hughesnet and dial-up, for the love of peanut butter.. TAKE THE DIAL-UP!