I was surprised to see no comments or posts about all the changes with the move from the DirecWay brand to HughesNet.

I have been playing with the stuff for a couple hours, doing all the e-mail changes, etc.

Comments? So far, I think it is a move in the right direction. At least there is a decent portal instead of the crap they used to have. Webmail has A LOT of "file not found" errors where you have to refresh over and over. Other than that, I am fairly pleased. Don't even mind moving mail. I didn't use it much, and now I can have an excuse to get rid of some spam.

I think all the changes are good, or at least in theory they are.  I agree that Hughes being a public company will put more pressure on them to perform and provide an acceptable level of service for more of their customer base.  I think in the past Directv did not have the vision or the financial resources or the desire to make DirecWay a profitable, reliable service.

It will probably take 2 - 5 years for Hughes to transform their company, but they seem committed to becoming a full service ISP.

Keep an eye on customer service and Spaceway 3.  Improving customer service and a successful launch of Spaceway 3 will be good indicators that Hughes is committed to getting better and is on the right track.

i justy checked my email and i had over 300 from here alone with replies.

yea tell me about it

The whole WildBlue thing is getting old. Dway has its problems, and I give credit to WildBlue for shutting down new installations when they were out of capacity (allegedly), but the fact is that a hell of a lot of us don't have the option. WildBlue doesn't offer service where I live. I checked before I upgraded to the 7000 and they still don't. I had issues with the 7000 at first with evening speeds, but that is now gone.

The moves are positive for us who are either happy at some level or have no choice (I am both). More capacity on e-mail and a decent portal are one step. Hopefully those steps will continue in the right direction.

As for a committment to customer service, lets hope the following is a sign of good things to come: The original drop dead date for your old mail was 4-22-06. Wow. Three weeks away. Not enough time for most people. However, they got a slew of calls, and now it is pushed to August. Certainly more than reasonable to move your mail. Signs of things to come? Let's hope so.

Yeah, I went over to Wild Blue forum last night and I agree with you dwells248, they don't seem to be doing any better than most Dway folks. And I have not had any real issues that I would not have with blue. And since they are new, they have a lot of noobie stuff to work out also. And I doubt I could start up a 4000 modem with them either. And you would have to buy all new equipment all over again. But I will probably go and read the wild forum again in a couple of months.
By the way, if you had not brought this up. Maybe some more folks might have switched over leaving more bandwidth for some of us.  ;)

Well we will see if anything gets fixed. To me it's just another attempt to get out of trouble by changing their name. This seemed to be the case when they changed from Direct PC.
So all we can do is wait and see...

Sid

Here is some general knoledge from my observation - I have had DW 6000 for a couple years  - If i recall it was 600.00  for dish etc,  and then 59,99 a month for 15 months - that was the contract  -  I usually got about 1000 down and anywhere from 7-14kb a sec up.  it was pretty consistant when it ran.  The problem was I got TCP ed out alot - Often in the afternoons from noon to about 6:00 pm the tcp acceleration would be out-  Everything was grounded perfectly but still I fould myself with my thumb on the wire trying to reduce the static and trying to get it to run alot.  (you know what i mean if you have one)  Also the signal was strongly affected by weather.  Rain (light was ok) but medium to heavy it was out also it would go out with storm clouds in the sky (especially of a storm was moving in or off)  DW hates storm clouds.   Overall when it ran it ran ok but it didnt run alot as well I would guess 10%-15% of the time on any given day the thing didnt work. And at 2.00 a day fee you would like to see those #s at 2 to 5%  - or thats how i figured it.  Also you can realistically download 164 mb then you are capped off until 4-8 hours  (and that is if you dont hit the cap  - if you do then you mine as well just go to bed and wait till the next day)    Well now I have wildblue.  I paid 346.00  total for dish and installation  (i think wb still has free installation for another week)  But I do have the 1.5 down 256k up  package for 79.99 a month BUT also included with this is dial up access # so if for a reason your sat doesnt work you do have a dialup #.  What uis nice is that you get 17 GB a month download  which is an average of about 600mb a day (but you can use as much as you want when you want)  also you get 5000GB up limit - again to use when you want - and every 30 days the amount resets back to zero - So if you want to download a 300 mb file, no problem. DW cant do this - Also it works much much better with weather and clouds.  And i find myself with no dead spots during the day and I dont have to "thumb" the stupid cord   as the tcp aint out every minute.  I get about 1550 down and 216kb up  - maybe a little slower at sometimes but generally as advertised.  The DW did seem to page surf slightly better  from page to page and downloading of Pics etc..  The wildblue doesnt seem to do that quite as well - close, but truthfully I do think the DW was a little better at page surfing also with multiple windows opened DW seemed to do well- Wildblue is better at opening large web pages and is faster at that task.   The client to download for the WB is a small 300  program - much like the DW and no problem at all - email works slightly different but about the same etc etc..  So far I am happier with the WB  because of the downloads and speedburts - I have seen 600-800 speedburts making a 1 mb file download a 2 sec process -  i really like that - it wont show on speedtests but in real world downloads you will see nice speedburts.  And MORE often than not you will see 400 speedburts dropping to about 220    - The DW was a pretty consistant 125-130kb a sec  so the WB on the pro package is about 2 times the download speed AT MINIMUM  -  hope this helps you out -  Keep looking at the sky.  over and out