An Honest Hughesnet Internet Review, According to Customers

HughesNet's internet plans start at $49.99 per month with speeds up to 100Mbps. The Select plan costs $50 per month, the Elite plan is $65 per month, and the Fusion plan is $95 per month. All plans come with 12-month promotional pricing.

The Select plan offers up to 50Mbps download speed, but the Elite and Fusion plans both get up to 100Mbps download speed. You can get 100GB of priority data each month on the cheapest plan, while the Elite and Fusion plans give you 200GB data. The Select and Elite plans get 650ms latency or ping, whereas the Fusion plan gets 100ms latency.

The right plan for you will depend on how much download speed you need and how much high-speed data you want.

Hughesnet's Select plan only offers up to 50Mbps of download speed, and since Elite and Fusion offer the same speeds, users might as well save $30 a month and go for Elite. Elite's up to 100Mbps download speeds should easily cover casual internet browsing, streaming, and gaming. 

Several customers told Reviews.org that Hughesnet’s service is slow and customer service could be improved. “Once, while gone on vacation with everything powered off, all my data was mysteriously gone,” writes user Frntwe on a Reviews.org Reddit post. The former Hughesnet customer understood that priority data was limited, so they unplugged their TV and made sure that appliances were turned off while they were gone. “Hughesnet’s excuse was our TV updated or some smart appliance updated and used the data,” they recall. This was not possible considering they didn’t own any smart appliances.

According to Joseph Talbot, another former customer, Hughesnet’s call center also left much to be desired. “I would ask them questions about how the high-speed data plan is non-functional, and then I would frequently get forwarded to a call center to someone who barely understood me,” says Talbot, who resides in Kittrell, North Carolina with his fiancée.

Hughesnet customers usually choose the provider because they can’t access fiber or cable providers, so they look to satellite internet as the next best option. “My main issue is that there is not a lot of service available in rural areas,” says Talbot, who moved to North Carolina after living in New York City, and is disappointed with both Hughesnet and Viasat in Kittrell. “There’s no reason why they’d be charging $120, $150 a month for service that is essentially from 1994.”

Talbot and his fiancée were only getting around 5Mbps download speeds and had daily outages. When Talbot contacted customer service to voice his concerns, there were no attempts made to improve the service. “Just because you don’t live in New York City or California,” he says, “doesn’t mean you deserve to be left out of the modern world.”

Reddit user Frntwe noticed that they would have multiple issues with reliability, such as laggy Wi-Fi that disrupted FaceTime calls. “I had it for years. There were no alternatives,” says the Reddit user. Since they live in a rural region of Michigan’s upper peninsula, satellite internet is the only option.

Another Reddit user, Jezra, was a Hughesnet customer for seven years before Starlink came to town. “The latency on GEO Sat service makes video conferencing difficult at best, and downright unusable is the norm,” they told Reviews.org. “That means no work from home, telehealth, or online school.”

Hughesnet is available throughout the contiguous United States, Puerto Rico, and Alaska. If you’re not able to connect to fiber, cable, or DSL, it’s likely that Hughesnet is an option for you.

Starlink, another satellite provider, gets the most positive reviews from rural dwellers. Starlink has more expensive monthly plan fees and equipment, but you’re getting a better experience overall and you don’t have to deal with data caps, cancellation fees, or contracts.  The provider advertises up to 100Mbps download speeds on its standard residential plan, which is the same maximum speed on Hughesnet, but Starlink has much lower latency rates that make it possible to actually play online games and take Zoom calls.

Viasat Unleashed advertises the highest max download speeds up to 150Mbps, but if you look closely at the plan’s broadband nutrition facts label, it indicates that typical speeds are actually around 87 Mbps.

For those who are cost-conscious, T-Mobile’s 5G cellular network via 5G Home Internet or through mobile hotspot is available widely across the United States and makes a worthy alternative. “I’m able to use the internet on my cell phone and tap into that for the household,” says former Hughesnet customer, Joseph Talbot. “The service is not quite where we need it to be, but that’s the nature of the wireless connection.”

Hughesnet’s download speeds are slow and latency is high, but the Select and Elite plans are cheaper than what you can find with Viasat or Starlink. See if it’s available in your neighborhood in our zip check below.