Levi,
We pay around $100 a month for a 300 MegaByte "Home Plan" package. Installation & set up was spendy. None of the discounts apply here that are available in the 48s.
http://www.hughesnetalask...vices.htmlWe did get lucky in that there is a guy here who does installation & set up. In some villages you either do it yourself or pay to fly someone in. I've some friends way out in the Bush who did it themselves. Since the nearest telephone was a half day away on the other side of a bay, dealing with online help was a challenge for them. One person stayed at the neighbors with the phone and relayed instructions back to their place on the VHF.
We've only had to deal with customer service once, a problem configuring a router and their help desk was actually helpful.
Aside from the challenge of keeping the dish clear of snow & ice (it's on the roof), we've not had any problems.
The usage restrictions aren't really a problem for us - anymore we are fairly light bandwidth consumers. We don't download a lot of stuff. Susan streams Netflix stuff sometimes, but she does that from 10pm to 2am Alaska time when we get unregulated usage. Whenever possible we schedule software updates for the free period.
As far as the service goes, when we posted internet speeds here in the past, I was always the slowest. The provider we had in the past - the local phone co-op, had one dish and then rationed out bandwidth via dialup or WISP. We were lucky to be within line of sight of the antennae, so we had WISP, but it was still painfully slow and very unreliable.
But if the same company owns WildBlue and HughesNet, there's probably no reason for you to switch.