Avonline claim ‘up to’ 20Mbps download and 6Mbps upload speeds for their service. The nature of a satellite broadband service (a fixed maximum bandwidth divided by the number of subscribers) means that actual performance may vary according to demand on the system.  Tooway may also throttle individual accounts if they have gone over their allocation or breached the ‘fair use policy’. However it is impossible to find out whether that has in fact happened, as Tooway/Avonline provide no subscriber-accessible monitoring tools – a major omission.

The Ka-band satellite used has three spot beams covering Scotland. When asked, Avonline stated that the 475Mbps spot beam covering the local area had about 2,500 subscribers, with a maximum capacity of circa 10-12,000.

Here then, I’m including snapshots of actual throughput achieved at different times, using both Tooway’s own speed tester and the public tester at Speedof.me. Comparing results from the two can be informative as the Speedof.me results are probably going to be closer to real-world throughput whereas the Tooway tester is probably close to Tooway’s own network rather than the wider Internet.