Hi,
I'm seriously considering the purchase of a Tooway satellite service (on the KA band), probably the Tooway 10 (10Mb/2Mb/13GB) option.

I currently have 2 separate ADSL circuits each offering about 512Mbps (one of them sometimes re-sync's unto 1Mbps but rarely stays there).  I have an excellent load balancing router (Peplink Balance 30) which I use to combine the two links.

So with regard to Tooway's service I have a few questions that I'd really appreciate your thoughts/views on.

What modem is supplied with the service and is it a modem (not a router)?  The important question to me is does it provide a public IP address to whatever it's connected to or does it use NAT?  

I intend to retain my Balance 30 and one of my ADSL circuits.  The Balance 30 does NAT so I don't want the satellite modem to do it to (otherwise I'll suffer issues of double-NAT).  I need/want to retain my Balance 30 since it will enable me to retain one of my ADSL circuits and choose what traffic uses which service (also it has the facility to monitor throughput and I can set it's monthly limit to 13GB and it won't let me exceed that).  Is the modem connection PPPoE or Ethernet with DHCP?

Speed-wise, I'm fully aware of the unrealistic speed promises from ADSL.  What are the real-world speeds that I can expect from Tooway?

Many thanks in advance, cheers Ian

I think the 13GB/4weeks may have been upgraded for the new Tooway service on KA-SAT.  This page https://www.bentley-walker.com/tooway/tooway_home.php shows 10Mb/2Mb/39GB for the Tooway10 option.  Note that in addition to the GB allowance over a 4 week time period, there are other smaller allowances that apply to shorter periods of time such as 1 hour.  The amounts of traffic transferred per time period are recalculated every 5 minutes. These time periods and the way they advance every 5 minutes are called sliding windows. The whole process is called the "Fair Access Policy" or "FAP" and is designed to share out the satellite capacity fairly, proportional to your payment for the relevent package.

The Tooway10 option is a "home user" package and does not have a public IP address. There are "business user" packages (see https://www.bentley-walker.com/tooway/tooway_business.php) which each include 4 public IP addresses.

Regarding speeds, my impression is that Tooway customers have generally been very pleased with their service, particularly if they have learned here first about sliding time windows and traffic allowances. The exceptions have been people with abnormally high traffic requirements and whose unrealistic expectations were for a dedicated type service. They found themselves slowed down, and were rather annoyed, when their traffic allowances were exceeded. The "home user" Tooway packages are not intended for use for web servers, frequent massive file transfers, P2P file sharing or prolonged video or audio transfers.

Try measuring your download speed here: https://www.satsig.net/speed-test/speed-tester.htm

Check with your proposed service provider and package choice what are the current traffic allowances and time periods. Also ask about any on-line facility they have for you to check your current FAP status and how much of each allowance is remaining. Some legacy ( 2008 ) FAP discussions for Tooway Ku band and Tooway Ka band on Hotbird are here: https://www.satsig.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=tooway;action=display;num=1224154655  Note that this information is now well out-of-date but it will help you understand from where the new system has evolved with its higher speeds and higher traffic allowances.

I hope that current Tooway users will come here and please add their comments about their Tooway service.
wxw
Best regards, Eric.

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the reply, I appreciate you taking the time to respond to me.

With regard to my NAT / public IP question I should have been a bit clearer I think (I don't think I actually asked the right question).

It's not so-much whether I get a public or private IP address from the satellite CPE (I don't care).  

If it was a public address I'd be fine with that (but I take onboard what you said, in that this is not going to be the case).

So based on me getting a private IP address what I need to know is whether the CPE is doing any NAT between my public and private IP addresses or whether it's a straight one-to-one relationship between my private IP and the public one.

Thanks again.

Cheers Ian

I don't know.

Ask BW or one of the other Tooway service providers.
Or wait for someone to maybe answer here - or maybe not...

Best regards, Eric.

Thanks again Eric.

I've been in contact with a number of UK based Tooway resellers and all I'll say is "there seems to be a wide variation in their technical expertise" and "inconsistent answers" which isn't giving me the confidence I need before I dive-in and invest in a satellite service.

Hopefully someone on this forum who actually has the new Ka band Tooway service will be able to provide the information I need.

My 6 meg Tooway from Bentley Walker was activated about 10 days ago. I wasn't silly enough to expect a full 6megs all the time but from the hype I was hoping for perhaps 90%. Ho, ho, poor sap! It's been between the 3's and 4's, once achieving slightly over 5 megs. I left it until today to make sure that this was the standard and then I phoned BW tech support to discuss things like modem setup to see if the speed could be improved. Before I had even finished speaking the man at the other end began with that infuriating phrase "what you have got to understand is..." He went on to say things like "there is an atmosphere that it has to get through" WHAT? Should I live on the Moon? Another revelation was "When you go to BT etc you never get the advertised speed". Precisely, that's why I BOUGHT FLAMING TOOWAY! A real gem was, "It's satellite and it's a wonder it works at all!". We've been conned again chaps. A BW salesperson told me you can expect down to 50% of the advertised speed. This information has to be "dug out", apparently. They couldn't put it on the advertising I suppose? So that customers can at least be prepared and not disappointed? Who is more stupid actually, marketing people or us?

Sorry I barged in on your post, Heathy65, with my rant. I can tell you it is a modem, which I used initially with network cable, now I have added a Belkin router and I have a desktop connected directly and a laptop via wireless. I have to confess to not knowing much about ip addresses and not knowing what NAT is. The speed I get is the same on both computers so I don't think the problem I'm complaining about is anything to do with my wireless link.

No problem with your "barge" :-)

I'm glad to hear from a real user about 'user experience'.

It's particularly interesting to hear what you're being told about speed too.

I've been emailing/speaking to a number of UK suppliers and asking them a number of different technical questions and also canvasing their views on expected speeds etc.

On the technical side I'm getting some very varied responses which indicate a 'somewhat variable' level of skills, in my opinion.  I'm totally new to satellite technologies but have the luxury of 20+ years of data/voice networking experience.....God, I'm feeling old! :-).....so I think I have a fairly good ability to judge.

Speed-wise it's certainly been strongly suggested to me that I'd get pretty close to the headline speed (one guy told me I'd absolutely get that rate, no question).

It's very frustrating that the reality doesn't seem to match the sales talk.

fendweller wrote on Jul 6^th, 2011 at 2:04pm:

My 6 meg Tooway from Bentley Walker was activated about 10 days ago. I wasn't silly enough to expect a full 6megs all the time but from the hype I was hoping for perhaps 90%. Ho, ho, poor sap! It's been between the 3's and 4's, once achieving slightly over 5 megs. I left it until today to make sure that this was the standard and then I phoned BW tech support to discuss things like modem setup to see if the speed could be improved. Before I had even finished speaking the man at the other end began with that infuriating phrase "what you have got to understand is..." He went on to say things like "there is an atmosphere that it has to get through" WHAT? Should I live on the Moon? Another revelation was "When you go to BT etc you never get the advertised speed". Precisely, that's why I BOUGHT FLAMING TOOWAY! A real gem was, "It's satellite and it's a wonder it works at all!". We've been conned again chaps. A BW salesperson told me you can expect down to 50% of the advertised speed. This information has to be "dug out", apparently. They couldn't put it on the advertising I suppose? So that customers can at least be prepared and not disappointed? Who is more stupid actually, marketing people or us?

Have a look here for info about speed, volume etc.  click here

MAX download speed in Kbps and MAX upload speed in Kbps.

Don't blame providers unless they give you incorrect info about speed, basically they should even not answer this question because what one person might consider to be fast, another person may not.  It depends so much on the individuals experience and expectations.

I agree the answers from the sales person at BW are a bit strange :), you just spoke to the wrong person, in general their expertise is very good !

Just to make you feel better, we have the same results on our UK and Spanish ADSL lines, we never get the MAX speed.

Why do you expect from Tooway to get the MAX and don't expect this from BT ?

Satellite systems are a last resort in cases where an adsl landline is not possible, don't expect miracles from it.

ps. The service is not provided by BW or any other Tooway reseller, the service is provided by Eutelsat Skylogic.

As I said, I DIDN'T expect the max, just something close, and the reason was that Tooway has been promoted on the basis that you actually get what you pay for. I am indeed in practically a not-spot in north Cambs. All suppliers concentrate on towns and cities while ignoring the sticks. My BT line is capable of a shaky 1MB. The sticks is what satellite is supposed to be best at. Higher speeds from wires are limited by physics. Tooway can supply higher speeds if you pay more so what can the excuse be for not providing full service at lower speeds?

The excuse for not providing the full service peak bit rate all of the time, or even nearly all of the time,  is that it is being sold at a very very much lower price than a dedicated full service speed.

A dedicated 1 Mbit/s service might be charged at so much per month (e.g. $3000 - $9000), whereas a shared 1 Mbit/s might be charged at 10, 20 or 50 times lower price (e.g. $150 - $500).  In a shared service you only get your fair share of the capacity, proportional to the amount you pay. You really DO get what you pay for.

If a service provides 24 GBytes per 4 weeks that is an average of 80 kbit/s.

Think about the other sites that are active, all sharing the same downlink carrier in your spot beam. Similarly in the uplink, you can only transmit for small portion of the time to give the other sites their fair chance to uplink their bursts.

Best regards, Eric.

Thanks Eric, all sounds very reasonable BUT, the Tooway advertising suggested to idiots like me that we would actually get  6 megs. It's not as if I use the service for long periods each day or for large downloads. Fair use would be to take that into account. They slow it down if you exceed your limits. Why shouldn't they give some in the opposite case. Why is everyone so darned defensive of "them"?

The problem is that "advertisers" are marketing oriented people whose are trying to sell the product and service. In order to do this they find it helpful to put across simple messages that don't fully reflect the complex nature of the service.  They would love to simply say that their service gives 10 Mbit/s and is far better than someone else's service at 1 Mbit/s.

The trouble is that people become fixated by the headline advertised bit rate thinking that higher is better.  What matters is avoiding annoying "slow" downloads and this is achieved by having adequate capacity and higher cost per site per month.  An upper bit rate of 2 Mbit is fully adequate for most users.  That is far better than a service with "up to 10 Mbit/s" with thousands sharing (to keep the costs per site down) but is so congested that everyone is complaining.

Examples of services:

10M/2M shared amongst 600 sites.  

40M/8M shared amongst 2400 sites.

Example FAP (Fair Access Policy) for system using a 40 Mbit/s download carrier.:

0600 till 2359 FAP applied:
0.001 sec 40 Mbit/s
0.01 sec  10 Mbit/s
1 sec 1 Mbit/s
1 hour  200 kbit/s
1 month 16 kbit/s

Midnight - 0559 FAP disabled:
Free-for-all

The above is just a summary but you can see how it is starting to become very complex to explain, never mind trying to get across how a 5 minute sliding time window works.

Q:  In your opinion what should the advertiser say is the headline rate for the FAP service above ?

I know its a pain but I do try to put a cap on it.

In this website the word "unlimited" is banned in respect of any kind of shared service.  Peak bit rates should be qualified by expressions such as "up to", FAP policies mentioned if applied and the number of sites sharing if applicable, e.g. "1M/256k shared 40:1 No FAP".  Note that some service providers offer "free-for-all" access either all of the time or during off-peak night periods.  During free-for-all-periods you are not assured any fair share of the system and you may suffer congestion or really fast service; it depends on what others are doing and how many of them are active.

If you can point out any Tooway service resellers with advertising that has mislead you, then tell them their advertising has mislead you and ask them to please  amend it within one month. Copy your email to me. If there is no improvement they can be banned and the ASA and Oftel informed.

Best regards, Eric.

Hello,

I have a Surfmodem 2 with my Tooway system and it is providing me with a dynamic Public IP, NO NAT at all.

Hope this helps.

MrMuckyPaws wrote on Jul 8^th, 2011 at 3:09pm:

Hello, I have a Surfmodem 2 with my Tooway system and it is providing me with a dynamic Public IP, NO NAT at all. Hope this helps.

Hi,
Yes that does.
What provider did you get your system from and what service/package are you on?
Cheers Ian

Thanks Eric. I've calmed down a bit now. It is of course a much better service than anything I've had before and as you say, most of the time 2Mb/s is plenty. As the satellite "fills up" with subscribers, will the congestion/speed situation deteriorate or is Skylogic handling it in such a way that individual throughputs will remain practically constant?

Heathy65 wrote on Jul 4^th, 2011 at 8:00am:

Hi, I'm seriously considering the purchase of a Tooway satellite service (on the KA band), probably the Tooway 10 (10Mb/2Mb/13GB) option. I currently have 2 separate ADSL circuits each offering about 512Mbps (one of them sometimes re-sync's unto 1Mbps but rarely stays there).  I have an excellent load balancing router (Peplink Balance 30) which I use to combine the two links. So with regard to Tooway's service I have a few questions that I'd really appreciate your thoughts/views on. What modem is supplied with the service and is it a modem (not a router)?  The important question to me is does it provide a public IP address to whatever it's connected to or does it use NAT?   I intend to retain my Balance 30 and one of my ADSL circuits.  The Balance 30 does NAT so I don't want the satellite modem to do it to (otherwise I'll suffer issues of double-NAT).  I need/want to retain my Balance 30 since it will enable me to retain one of my ADSL circuits and choose what traffic uses which service (also it has the facility to monitor throughput and I can set it's monthly limit to 13GB and it won't let me exceed that).  Is the modem connection PPPoE or Ethernet with DHCP? Speed-wise, I'm fully aware of the unrealistic speed promises from ADSL.  What are the real-world speeds that I can expect from Tooway? Many thanks in advance, cheers Ian

I thought I'd update my original post and confirm my finding in relation to NAT / IP addressing etc, since I now have the Tooway service.

So, I'm pleased to confirm that there is no NAT and I'm getting a public IP address (95.x.x.x).  This address is no doubt dynamic so will change from time-to-time but that doesn't bother me, it's the fact that there's no NAT that's good for me.

So I've connected the satellite modem to my router (which is doing NAT) so all's fine in that regard.

It's also worth noting that the satellite modem has a static private IP address (192.168.100.1) which provides a web interface so that you can check the status of your connection.

Initially when you turn on the satellite modem (not that you would normally turn it off) then the modem's in-build DHCP server will provide your PC (or router if you have one connected) with a 192.168.100.x address (typically 192.168.100.3), so you can access the satellite modem web interface by using the https://192.168.100.1 URL.  

However once the satellite modem establishes a link to the Tooway network your PC will lose its 192.168.100.x address and it will be assigned with a public IP address (like 95.x.x.x).  Now I expected that if I was using a directly connected PC (i.e. not a router) that I would not be able to connect to the satellite modem anymore but I can.  I haven't figured out how that's working just yet!

The last comment I have (and something else I haven't worked out yet) is that on the satellite modem web interface there's a 10.x.x.x private address shown.  I can ping my 10.x.x.x address but don't know what it's for (perhaps for remote monitoring/management of the satellite modem)?
Hope that helps