Hughesnet is among the leading satellite internet service providers in the USA, which has been providing satellite internet to millions of Americans who have limited internet choices due to their geographical location. One question that people recently have been asking is, whether the Hughesnet internet plans are unlimited. In a nutshell, the answer is negative; Hughesnet is not willing to provide its consumers with truly unlimited data options devoid of any limits. However, they do offer what they call “unmetered” plans but they too come with certain conditions.
Data Allowances Provided with Hughesnet Internet Plans
Hughesnet’s internet service options are listed below, with pre-designated data limits that are automatically replenished monthly. Once you go over your monthly data use, your speeds are reduced for the rest of the cycle you are subscribed to.
Its basic package provides only 10GB of data at high speed for the whole month. Mid-level packages allow you to use 20GB, 30GB, or 50GB of data. The first-tier plan is for $15/month and comes with 50GB or 100GB per month based on the contract length. Highly competitive it may be, even their top tier plan only offers 100GB of high-speed data allowance every month.
After the users have consumed the amount of data allowance in a month, access speeds are reduced to a measly 1-3Mbps, which is very slow by today’s standards. This hinders the ability to conduct activities such as streaming videos or music, downloading files, and video calling, among other tasks that require the use of large amounts of data during this throttled period.
This means that although Hughesnet does use some of the marketing terms such as ‘unlimited’, there is a limit to the high-speed data you can use before your internet speeds are lowered.
Off-Peak "Unlimited" Data Allowance
However, when it comes to the availability of unlimited data, Hughesnet does provide it, but only after midnight during the night. Every plan has an option for unlimited usage of data during certain periods of the night, for instance between 2 am and 8 am.
It is important to note that during this off-peak period, users can go as crazy as they want with data usage and speed will not be reduced. Nevertheless, without throttling, it is still possible that the download speeds will remain lower than the speeds during the peak time.
The freedom to download an almost infinite amount of data at night without the sites slowing down is great for some tasks such as downloading large software or system patches. However, the fact that it only works in the evenings detracts from the practical application. It is possible to get good download speeds at night, but everyday Internet use and streaming will likely still be slow with daytime throttling.
Additional Data Packages
Hughesnet has the option for buying additional data allowances as data tokens and data plans for your temporary usage of higher limit data allowance. This is high-speed data that does not use up the base amount of data that you are given with each token being 1GB, 3GB, or 10 GB. This applies to data tokens and you can get up to 40GB per month maximum as a maximum to be bought. They also provide their Data Extensions which give the extra 50GB of data usage allowance per month.
In this way, for the rest of the billing cycle, one can maintain higher speeds by buying more data in token or extension form before these throttling mechanisms would normally set in. However, these data-taking packages only give you a ‘temporary boost’ for that month and can be relatively costly. While they may temporarily remove or increase your base data limits, they do not permanently do so.
Free Satellite TV – Can You Get a Truly Unlimited Plan?
As of now, Hughesnet does not provide any boundless high-speed satellite database usage plans that are unhampered by limitations and speed reductions. Currently, there is no unlimited package available in the market from any major residential satellite internet service provider mainly due to some technology constraints.
Satellite internet involves the use of signals which are in the form of data transmitted between a satellite and ground-based equipment. Presently, there is limited bandwidth that can be incorporated on any given satellite and it takes a huge investment to establish the network linkages. Therefore, the proposal to provide unlimited high-speed data to all customers cannot be implemented due to the limitations offered by the current satellite technology.
To this end, some satellite providers have introduced new data allowance plans that specify high usage or even unlimited usage in a bid to offer unlimited access. However, these plans still include throttling at extremely slow and very low speeds as soon as the proposed unreasonable usage limits are crossed.
For families who do not have any other alternative than to get connected to cable or fiber optic services in rural areas, satellite is the only option for broadband connection for their homes. And so many customers remain with satellite and operate with the constraint of a capped data plan because that is the only way they can have any home Internet connection at all, though it may be relatively slow and suffer from other constraints from time to time.
The satellite internet industry remains focused on improving existing bandwidth and speed capabilities by investing in better satellite constellations and ground infrastructure. This could pave the way for never-before-seen genuinely unrestricted, throttled unlimited high-speed satellite data in the future. However, for the time being, all satellite Internet plans are limited by data quotas and speed caps, meaning that even Hughesnet’s offerings are not immune to this practice. Consumers have to decide if they can handle the limitations of satellite internet fine enough to have their needs met.
