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Hughesnet’s subscriber base has fallen to 883,000 amid competition from SpaceX’s Starlink.
A year ago, Hughesnet had about 1 million customers. The satellite internet service has since lost 117,000 subscribers, according to an earnings report from Hughesnet parent EchoStar.
The drop occurs even though Hughesnet is now offering faster internet speeds through its new Jupiter 3 geostationary satellite. The company’s internet plans are also cheaper than Starlink. But on the downside, Hughesnet can reduce download speeds once the 100GB or 200GB data threshold has been passed.
Meanwhile, Starlink has received rave reviews for offering speeds up to 200Mbps and low latency of around 20 to 30 milliseconds. In contrast, Hughesnet latency was between 700-800ms in a 2023 Ookla study.
Still, EchoStar's earnings report are an overall slowdown in subscriber losses; the company shed 29,000 satellite internet customers in Q4—down from the 59,000 it lost during the same period a year earlier. “This decrease in net Broadband Satellite subscriber losses was primarily due to lower subscriber disconnects as a result of the new EchoStar XXIV (Jupiter 3) satellite service launch,” the company said.
"If we look at our Jupiter GEO service, we’re focused primarily on customers that we see want video services,” EchoStar COO Paul Gaske said on an earnings call. “An awful lot of them just want to watch their streaming videos nowadays, so we’ve repurposed our positioning to provide an economical satellite solution for rural America.”
Hughesnet had 1.56 million customers in December 2020, two months after the arrival of Starlink. Since then, Hughesnet and another competitor, Viasat, have both been losing users while Starlink has attracted over 4.6 million active customers. Last year, SpaceX told the FCC that more than 1.4 million of those customers were in the US.