NordNet Offer Free Satellite Equipment

NordNet, part of Orange.fr, have just anounced a new package of 2048 Kb/s and 2Go limit per month at a price of 34.90€/month. You need to sign up for 24 months and if you hit your 2Go limit you can purchase another 1Go until the end of your month. It includes free supply of the parabole, modem, WiFi Router and delivery.

Last year, the French government launched its Plan France Numerique 2012 which basically stated that every French household should have access to the Internet for less than 35€ per month and at a speed of 512Kb/s. The Orange/Nordnet package will go a long way to making that plan a reality because the satellite covers 100% of the territory and there are around 500,000 homes which can't get broadband by conventional means.

https://www.nordnet.com/fp/FP_pack-satellite.pdf

Installation of the NordNet system can be performed by Orbit Home Technologies all over France. info@orbit-direct.com 0553914652.

The message at the top of this thread might have been censored by me earlier if I had spotted it, but I missed it before someone else added their comment.

The original post is misleading as it should say that this is shared system, with speeds of up to 2048 kbit/s. It is therefore misleading spam advertising. Be warned.

Readers should be aware that 2 GBytes over a month is equivalent to an average of only 6.3 kbit/s.  You only get what you pay for.  Satellite bit rate is a very expensive commodity.

The advertised service appears suitable for perhaps 1 PC, used rather less than average.  It is helpful that an extra 1 GByte may be optionally purchased.  Typical PC users on a shared system, need at least 10kbit/s average and should be paying at least $70 per month.

Best regards, Eric.

A shared system is one in which the satellite capacity is shared amongst a number of customer sites.

The outlink carrier (download data flowing from the internet towards all the customer sites) may be 1 Mbit/s, but ALL the sites do their downloading via this fixed total capacity.  If there are 100 sites then the long term average download speed per site cannot exceed 10 kbit/s.  At rare times when only 1 customer is on-line the download speed might be 1 Mbit/s, but when a second customer starts downloading simultaneously the speed drops to 500kbit/s for each and so on.  During the day download speed will vary from second to second, according to the number of active sites.

The cost of the service is inverse to the number of sites sharing.  So 100 sites might each pay $70 towards the 1 Mbit/s total.  Alternatively a business customer, operating a community ISP (Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa etc) with 100 local wired or wireless customers, might buy 1 Mbit/s in dedicated SCPC mode and pay $7000 per month.  The community ISP is not sharing its satellite capacity with anyone else, but the ISP's 100 end-user customers are sharing the 1 Mbit/s.

Shared systems use TDMA return links towards the teleport hub. All sites transmit on the same frequency, but only one site at a time with each site transmitting very brief bursts - so time shared.

In this satsig.net forum I am very strict that there should be no suggestion that shared services will give data throughputs comparable with dedicated services.  The cost of shared service may be 100 or 1000 times lower than dedicated service, but so is the throughput.  You simply get what you pay for.

Shared systems normally have some kind of fair-access-policy (FAP) designed so that you can pay different tariffs and get your proportional fair share. A typical Tooway FAP will limit the amount of Mbytes downloaded per unit time period. e.g.

53 Mbytes in 1 hour
100 Mbytes in 4 hours = 25 Mbytes per hour
300 Mbytes in 24 hours (day) = 12.5 Mbytes per hour
800 Mbytes in 168 hours (week) = 4.7 Mbytes per hour
2000 Mbytes in 672 hours (4 weeks) = 2.9 Mbytes per hour

ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) is a phone line method of data access to the internet. The capacity on the wires between your house and the telephone exchange is dedicated to you but at the exchange where all the customer lines converge there is a router and a higher speed data link towards the internet backbone and the servers. There is potential for congestion in the higher order link if many ADSL customers are downloading simultaneously - so some kind of FAP is applicable.  ADSL is far cheaper than satellite as no satellite is required !

Downloading 1700 Mbytes is similar via satellite or ADSL. In both cases if you download what appears as 1700 Mbytes of file size, you will actually have downloaded approx 1785 Mbytes and uploaded 85 Mbytes due to packet header overheads and request / acknowledgement packets.  Satellite acceleration software is often used to give packet header and payload compression to reduce the Mbytes over the satellite.  Improvements vary from nil for the highest image quality settings to massive savings like 19:1 for plain text ftp log file downloads.  Such turbo software makes satellite operation more competitive.

Regarding double counting of your downloads.  I suggest this is false traffic logging.  I don't understand how it happens but I have seen it also on my server, with the log files showing duplicate file transfers when it is clear from external monitoring that the file was only sent once.  It happened with large audio "podcasts" downloads.  Keep complaining and ask for rebate.
 
Best regards, Eric.

The number of complaints about Nordnet service should be minimal if they make sure potential customers understand in advance what the service will actually provide. It is a matter of not misleading customers and raising their expectations unduly.

There is a 4 Mbyte (26 minutes to download at 20kbit/s) pdf document on their web site https://www.nordnet.com/cgv/CI-AboSatellite-280509A.pdf which gives details of the "up-to" bit rates and download/upload Mbyte thresholds.  They offer seven different tariffs, two of which are illustrated below:

Note that basic service has gradually reducing "up-to" bit rates as you exceed progressively larger Mbyte thresholds. The headline "3 Gbyte" service, offers 2.5 Gbyte download and 500Mbyte upload, with the service interrupted to zero once you exceed your monthly quota.  The volume of data exchanged is reset once a month.

I support the idea that customers should be able to monitor their upload/download amounts in real time as being recorded at teleport hub.  Ask about this.

Anyone trying to sell satellite internet access service should have a web site that works well with dial-up data speeds...

Best regards, Eric.