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Homefusion review @ 1 year

Well slow day at work so thought I'd share my experience with Homefusion. I've had the service for slightly over 1 year now. I have a desktop, laptop, 3 tablets, 2 phones, xbox 360 and playstation 3 that routinely connect. Data usage is about 15-18gb per month. My home is not very rural, but just far enough that cable is not an option and the DSL service I can get is about 756k and drops if it rains anywhere in 150 mile radius (I'm not joking, I live in Arkansas and I could always tell when it was raining in Tulsa). Speed is good with +20mbs down and typical latency 75-100ms. I'll touch on it below, but by far the biggest drawbacks are data limits and cost.

Who is it good for? Well if you can't get cable/dsl and want a decent broadband connection with lower latency it works very well. I use it all the time for online gaming. For example Halo 4 on xbox, Borderlands 2 on PS3, SWOR/WOW/Starcraft/Minecraft on PC all work well. My typical experience has been these games use about 30-50mb an hour of play with small amounts of voice chat (can vary quite a bit). Of course updating games can chew up data. We are generally pretty heavy internet users. It works well for most everything I do, but understand that I'd drop it in a second for a decent wired connection to get rid of the data caps and cut my bill in half.

What is it not good for? Video. You can watch youtube videos from time to time, but people really under estimate how much data you can chew up with HD video, even youtube. You are not going to want to use any video services like Netflix or Amazon Prime. Homefusion's connection is fast and these services will ramp up the video quality to take advantage of that and you will blow through data. I have Amazon Prime and I have watched a few TV shows with it and my experience has been about 1-1.5gb per hour. You also have to be careful with computers (or consoles) updating. I do not let anything auto-update and will use my extra data on the last day or two of the month to update. I will sometimes tether my phone to use up its data on updates as well.

Problems? I have had some of the frequent resetting problems that others have had. It was especially bad Nov-Dec of last year with several resets a day. For the past 2-3 months that has really calmed down. I now I notice it about 1-2x per week. It is annoying, but even at its worst it was about the same as my bad DSL.

I find the router's menus to be rather cumbersome and slow, but just about every function you wound expect of a router is buried in there somewhere. I run a second wireless router for the basement without problems.

I have not had any of the phantom data usage that other's report. I cannot say why others have had this issue. I can say that I watch my data very closely. Once or twice I have had big months where I had to bump up my data limit to 30gb, but in generally 20gb has been just right. Those times that I did go over it was not a surprise and I just bumped up my data before hand (generally downloading an entire game or massive updates etc). I do not let anything auto update. Our phones and one of the tablets share 6 gig of data and often I will try to use up that data as well.

Thoughts...it works well for what it is. It is better than my alternatives. It is expensive. Its data limits are too low (they need to go up by a factor of 10). All in all I am pretty happy, I'd love to get a wired connection but this is the best alternative I have found so far.

Comments

rusty0007

I too live in Arkansas, in a similar situation as you. I've had HF for about 10 months. I've also got a similar data load and have found out the same about youtube and such. We use about 20 gig per month. We are on the 30 gig plan and sometimes go over 25 gig just depending on our devices and required updates. We have had frequent disconnects as well, but we've kinda lived with it. Everything was fine until this month.

I started getting overage notices and contacted VW. They assured me that my usage was at 23 gig on the 23rd of May and not the erroneous report of exceeding 30 gig and that the detail page of MyVerizon was reporting in error. It was an issue they knew about and not to worry. A trouble ticket was submitted on my frequent restarts. Ater a week with no word in regard to my ticket I contacted them again. No word on my ticket, but they did comment that my data usage was deemed to be correct. As of today its exceeding 58 gig and climbing. After 2 hours and 43 minutes on the phone with them I basically got no where. The 'real time' data reporting indicates I consumed 8.7 gig at 3:13 AM, for example. Some other big data exchanges happened in the wee hours of the morning too, when everyone is sleeping. In the last 10 months we have never exceeded 29 gig. Nothing, hardware wise or other wise, has changed. We have virus free Apple products, no PC's in the house. No one close enough to connect to our wifi network considering this router they sent doesn't even cover the whole house.

Even though I've liked the service until now, I informed Verizon that we need to get this resolved or I will have to terminate service. I simply can not accept the possibility of having a $400+ dollar internet bill. I feel there is something wrong with their metering system and I also think they know it. Right now, them saying ' you used the data' and me saying ' its not physically possible'.

jcaaron

*Updated*

Starting early August I started to have frequent disconnects. The service would only work for a few minutes and then loose connection. Resetting had no effect. It would take hours to reconnect at times and never stayed up long enough to use. After calling tech support every 2 days for 3 weeks and paying for a new router (sending it back), a service call (that I'm stuck paying for), and getting several different explanations they finally came to the conclusion that it is another firmware issue. They stated that the March upgrade (which did fix a lot of my previous disconnect problems) had caused new problems that started affecting people late July. No ETA on a fix, so they just suspended my service. Guess I'll update again if I get a resolution. But obviously not thrilled with the situation.

jcaaron

Newest update -

It has now been about 2 months without the Homefusion service working. My service is still suspended and the problem has been blamed on the router firmware. The ticket has been escalated to the manufacturer. They also lost my returned router and are still trying to track it down with the tracking number I have that shows it was returned to their warehouse.

I am still not clear on how after having the service for 16 months and 5 months after the last firmware update I suddenly have a firmware problem. So while my previous review of the first year of my service what more positive the last few months have not been so smooth.

bigbr85

Why is it that I keep reading that everyone has 20mbps and I only have 1.25mbps with home fusion? I have 4G and in a rural area. I was told I would at least get a minimum of 5mbps. Any ideas please help?

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