Moved to Dream House In The Country and HUGHESNET! Help! (How much data does ST use?)

We are pretty heavily invested in SmartThings and are very happy and spoiled with the whole integration. We use our ST along with our Amazon Echo (x3), Ecobee Thermostat, and Nest Cams.
We found a wonderful house out in the country and found out that the whole world doesn’t have high speed internet!! ~GASP~ :scream:
The ONLY game in town is HughesNet Gen4 and we sucked it up and gave a tearful goodbye to our $45/month high-speed, unlimited internet from Time Warner. (We had our spats with them, but I will miss them greatly.)
Now, I have a ping of 625 with a “guaranteed” down of 15Mbps and up of 2Mbps. :frowning:
To make things even worse, I have am capped at 20G of data :grimacing: (with a Bonus of 50G of data between 2am-8am.)
Should we hook up our ST here or just sell it???
It’s my understanding that the latency would put a delay in response of Things, but I can live with that.
How much data and bandwidth does ST use?
I really can’t afford to go over my data cap. I am really going to have to change our lifestyle as it is. We haven’t had TV (I won’t pay for cable and we live too far for “local” channels) in 7 years and just stream Netflix and Amazon Prime Streaming. No more of that!!! :cry:
I MISS MY SMARTTHINGS SOOOO MUCH!!!

Congrats on new residence. Hey you wanted to be in country right?

I would still use SmarThings in your case but more local run devices

No way in hell you’ll reach 20GB via packets using Smartthings.
Good bye Netflix though…

See if you can get one of those facebook internet planes to circle over your house. You can lure them by spelling out private information in white chalk on your back yard.

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You could hook yourself up with a data hotspot and have your ST just run through that.

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Well, you haven’t missed much :smile:

I’d looked into a data hotspot, as Jason mentioned above.

If you have a router that supports it, you can use load balancing/bandwidth management to connect to both a hotspot and to HughesNet … if the cost is right.

Cameras that upload to the cloud will be high data users.

The amount of traffic you’ll get will depend on the number of devices you have and how often they are used. If somebody is home and the house all day that will change usage patterns significantly.

What devices are you using now? And in particular are they zwave, zigbee, or WiFi?

Devices like power consumption monitors and temperature sensors seem to report most frequently on my network. If you keep those to a minimum you should be fine… but honestly as long as you stay away from cameras I can’t really see ST using a significant amount of data. One trip through a Facebook timeline will eat up much more, I would think

No DSL? Does your cell work there? If yes, then hotspot is the way to go. Sounds like you may need to become one of those people that fill hard drives with movies. Download them during the night.

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There’s always the Netflix DVD plan… :wink:

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Yep… the caveman way!

Yeah, I agree on the hotspot idea. If you look at the data coverage map of all cell providers, at least one will likely offer better data than the speeds quoted. Plus you should be able to get an “unlimited” plan for an OK price.

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No dsl available. CenturyLink goes to several of our neighbors, but their trunks are now at capacity.
Cell reception here is TERRIBLE, so I don’t think a Hotspot will work. I have to go out on the patio to send hubby a picture message.
I know I have to get rid of the DropCams…besides, we really don’t need them anymore now that we moved away from town.
My biggest concern is data usage and latency.
So we should be OK?

On the latency, no way to know until you try it. :sunglasses:

I asked for the specific device models that you’re using for a reason. There are some possibilities for setting things up locally, but it depends very much on just which devices you have.

Latency I always and issue with info going to 35000 feet and back. Hot spots are more powerful then phones so it may work. They also have external antennas that may help.

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I wish we lived in the country… But… yeah not happening! Good luck!

Sorry, I totally missed that question!
We have the 2.0 hub, 3 GE zwave light switches, 2 ST plugs, 4 Cree Light bulbs, 3 ST motion detectors, 3 ST door open/close sensors, and 1 ST multi sensor.
I think that’s all of it. I do have a couple of virtual switches for integration with Amazon Echo and we also have an Ecobee thermostat.

OK, most of those will be eligible to run locally. That should be good news, except the local operations have been pretty weird as far as whether they are slower or faster than going through the cloud. But it would definitely be worth trying.

The first thing you need to do is figure out which of those do run locally.

The community created wiki has the links you need to use to check both the smart apps you have and the devices.

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=FAQ

Note that at the present time the only smartapp which is eligible to run locally is the official smart lighting feature. Routines don’t run locally, The mobile app itself cannot communicate with the hub unless you have an Internet connection, any other smartapp won’t run locally. And you can’t change modes or smart home monitor alarm state locally. But you should be able to turn switches on and off and trigger them for motion sensors. And run schedules that ran as smart lighting automations.

Or you could just unplug the hub from the Internet and see what works. :sunglasses:

So although smartthings has very limited local processing, it does have some, and you might be able to use it.

Just a thought.