We had Direcway/Hughes for several years. The customer service was AWFUL. Not only could I barely understand many of the techs, I always had to go through the same hoops when I knew what was wrong with my system. It would take hours to troubleshoot something I knew was going to be a service call. Then it was several weeks until someone could come repair the moisture-damaged equipment.
At one point, they had me wait so long for service that my warranty ran out, forcing me to purchase new equipment when it should have been covered (we are talking 14 months worth of runaround, my warranty expired two months before they finally decided I needed a new dish, when it was the SAME problem all along).
I decided that I would not buy more equipment from them, I would switch. I went to Wild Blue/Dish Network on a special: $199.99 for the equipment with a one-year commitment to the service at $59.99 a month for the "middle" range speed package. We could bump it up one and it IS somewhat slow, but nowhere near as slow as dialup, which is my only other option out here.
The one thing I would caution is not to bother using the Wild Blue/Dish Network web-based mail. It has frequent outages, and they often last for days where you cannot access your email. I got a gmail account to make up for the dishmail.net outages. I have called about that, and all they tell me is that they are upgrading the system. That part of it plain ol' stinks.
Keep your eye out for the deal, though, they seem to offer it right after they arrive in town as ours did, in order to woo Hughes' customers away, and in my case, they didn't have to do much more than show up.
Liz
