My Tooway experience so far

With some search I found this forum, we have been on Tooway for half a year (environ).

While there have been some hardware problems, these were solved. The system is usually running pretty well, stable no matter if raining, snowing* or whatever, it simply works as it should.

*With to much snow in the dish it will stop working, as expected but simply cleaning the dish carefully with a soft brush and it works again.

The systems latency (as expected for technical reasons) is less then we had thought, VoIP works well enough, we do not play games or alike.

Only real problem, data allowance is far to low, we have the Tooway12 package ("Frequent user") with 16 GB data allowance.

When someone in your family tends to download/watch youtube videos, you'll be out of quota pretty fast. There are not only short clips on youtube & friends but tons of large videos in addition, a single takes quickly 350-700 MB. or even more, even in the lowest resolution. Not even thinking about HD videos!

Meaning just a single video per day is to much for the "frequent" user package with 16 GB (roughly 500 MB/day), even the more expensive packages with 26 and 50 GB do not really help, as well as volume booster (9,99€ for a single GB).

It seems to me this should be really changed in the otherwise well running Tooway system. 50GB/Month should be an entry level, I mean we have 2013!

Of course it seems those who are bound to Sat-Internet service have no other choice, then to accept the harsh limits.

Perhaps more and more 4g (LTE) offers might change these policies? Though LTE offers usually also restrict the download volume, but seem not cut you down that extreme 128/128 kbit (up/down) as Tooway does. Once you are in the FAP you can't do much anymore, though VoIP works (given you have a router giving it the needed priority), most web pages load so slow that it is a pita! ;-(

As said, volume boosters are not an option, it is simply far to expensive.

Dear Dave,

I had been using phone based ADSL in Germany, France and in Switzerland, though I have never ever heard about a quota (with anything >20€/month)? You pay for the connection speed and that's it, you can download whatever GB you want. With watching lots of videos, file sharing/etc. this can be quickly a few hundred GB a month, especially in a family. And I wouldn't even call this heavy usage.

So I don't know where your claims are valid, certainly not in the above mentioned countries, if you pay at least 20-35 €/month (including phone and some even less).

With the ridiculous low Tooway limit (Tooway12 frequent user), it means you can barley download 3 different Linux distribution DVDs and this will leave you with just about 2G for the rest of the month! All in 1,5 h!

I had lately checked the LTE (4g) offer from Vodafone (Germany), it leaves you after the data package you paid with 384/384 kbit (up/down) and is a volume flat, just as Tooway, so no additional costs at all! Though 384/384 are still 3 times the Tooway speed after you run sooner or later into the FAP.

Don't get me wrong, the Tooway system really flies, it is just like sitting in front of a delicious barbecue and for some reasons you are only allowed to eat 28g! The bigger Tooway packages don't offer much more, the 50 GB slightly, but for 100€/month, far to expensive?

So I hope the LTE (4g) competition will at least force Tooway to offer far more download allowance soon. Again, anything else is OK, I don't care about the technical unavoidable latency and alike. It is just we want to use the Internet as we were used from our ADSL line before, where we didn't had to care about if we can afford download something or not.

Best regards