For weeks now, we’ve been seeing very poor subjective performance from Tooway’s satellite service. When measured, we’re seeing a large discrepancy between what Tooway’s own speed tester shows and what we get from decent speed checkers such as Speedof.me.
Category Archives: Avonline
Experience and feedback from the trial of Avonline’s provision of the Eutelsat Tooway Satellite broadband service
Avonline Satellite Broadband Update
For the last few months, we’ve been running a trial of Avonline’s Tooway satellite-based broadband service, on behalf of the local Broadband Advisory Group. My report on the delivery and effectiveness of that solution to date is attached, here.
Claim and Reality
Tooway have issued a statement on their support blog about actual bandwidth versus the ‘headline’ claims of 20Mbpb/6Mbps throughput. You can read it here.
This is all entirely unsurprising, given the basic economics of satellite communications.
Traffic Shaping
Avonline have supplied their “Absolute” package, which was the introductory Tooway package. It provides – in principle – unlimited usage, subject to their Fair Access Policy (FAP). What that effectively means is that, if you go over 60GB (that’s what I was told – the FAP now says 50GB) usage in a rolling 30 day period, you are subject to throttling of your download and upload speeds until the peaks of high usage ‘fall off’ the rolling calendar. That throttling applies between 0700 and 2300 every day, but even data usage outwith those times count towards the calculation. Continue reading Traffic Shaping
Glacial Progress…
Continuing from last month’s update on attempts to bring the communications available to the three villages area into roughly the same century as the outside world, there’s a little good news and a whole lot of no news: Firstly, with BT awarded government funding under the Step Change 2015 programme to bring a minimum of 2Mb/s to 80% of the rural population, they have announced that they can deliver that level to 93.5% of us. That, whilst it would help a number of the “no-band” areas in the Trossachs, is unlikely make much difference in our area. The way in which BT will deliver this is also unlikely to be future proof in the local area and will deliver a maximum performance that falls far short of current ‘normal’ broadband, let alone the capacity that that online services are starting to assume as normal and for which they are designing their next generation of services. In effect, if you’re not a urban dweller with fibre cables in your street, you effectively become classed as the ‘rural poor’ and, by definition, don’t matter.
Continue reading Glacial Progress…