Tooway ™ Low cost satellite internet access services in the UK

In the UK about 1% of homes are too distant from BT phone exchanges to be able to have ADSL internet access. 1% may sound like a tiny number but for those affected this is a serious matter. 1% of 25 million home is 250,000 families affected, so you can see there is a problem. There are many VSAT services available. This web page is about one of these services, called “Tooway™" and provided by Skylogic from Turin. Italy. Skylogic is a teleport company owned by Eutelsat, the satellite operator. Providing a service like this helps them to use up capacity on their satellites.

Satellite communications is very high cost compared with terrestrial so the service provided to end users is shared, which many customers all sharing the same satellite bit rate. Tooway™ presently offers download speeds up to 2 Mbit/s by throttleing the outbound (download) traffic at the Turin teleport. The quantity amount of traffic (Mbytes) you can download depends on the price you pay. The more you pay the more you may download in a given time. Overall, you might get about 10 -15kbit/s average over a week, on the lower tariffs. If you have a need for long steady data transfers you would be better off with a 56kbit/s phone modem. If you want brief periods of up to 2 Mbit/s with long inactive periods in between, then shared satellite is appropriate. Voice calls are best made by phone line as a voice call (e.g. VoIP or Skype) represents a severe stress on the satellite network due to its continuous data flow (approx 12 to 30kbit/s) in both directions. Similarly uploading large files such as music or video is best minimised or avoided.

Tooway™ is already serving customers in 20 European countries including UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Ireland. The main retail resellers and service providers are Bentley Walker and El Molino.

Tooway™ operates with Viasat Surfbeam technology in the Ku-band or Ka band. It is delivered using Eutelsat’s EUROBIRD™ 3 satellite at 33º East or Hotbird 6 at 13 deg East.

In 2010, Eutelsat intends to expand the service with additional capacity using a new Ka band satellite called KA-SAT; a dedicated new satellite from specifically designed for broadband delivery in Europe and similar to the Wildblue and satellite. Ka-SAT provide coverage for all Europe. It will help if there are a good number of customers ready to transition to the new satellite.

Tooway™ is intended to provide satellite internet access for domestic and small business customers in remote locations in Europe within the beam coverages shown. The downlink is a single broad beam covering Europe. The uplink comprises several smaller Ka band spot beams to obtain higher uplink G/T and thus permit lower transmit eirp from the small earth stations.

Details of agents who you may wish to contact regarding service:
Bentley Walker   Web site: Bentley Walker Tooway Email: sales@bentleywalker.com
El Molino    Web site: www.europe-satellite.com
Avonline   Web site: www.avonline.co.uk/
Remote Data Services: Web site: www.rdserv.com/

Advanced coding/modulation and dynamic rain fade mitigation techniques are used to minimise outages during heavy rain. The return links and capacity are dynamically assigned to make best use of the satellite capacity available.

A variety of traffic quantities per time period are offered with corresponding tariffs. The system incorporates an integrated performance enhancing proxy (PEP) with pre-fetch to speed up browsing and downloads.

Tooway ™ FAP or Fair Access Policy

The traffic flow at all sites is limited to try to ensure that everyone gets their fair share. The more you pay the more you get. Example for a BRONZE tariff user:

Tooway FAP Fair Access Policy limits (example):

53 Mbytes in 1 hour = 117.6 kbit/s
100 Mbytes in 4 hours = 25 Mbytes per hour = 55.2 kbit/s
300 Mbytes in 24 hours (day) = 12.5 Mbytes per hour = 27.7 kbit/s
800 Mbytes in 168 hours (week) = 4.7 Mbytes per hour = 10.4 kbits/
2000 Mbytes in 672 hours (4 weeks) = 2.9 Mbytes per hour = 6.4 kbit/s

This graphic table gives some idea of the instantaneous site status:

Tooway FAP status

This FAP graphic above shows the actual status of a customer site that has exceeded its weekly 800 Mbytes allowance. Once time has passed, using a sliding window re-calculated every 5 minutes, and the average for the past week has reduced to an acceptable amount then the site will be up and running again at full speed.

It is a pity that Eutelsat are not using circular polarisation (as used for Wildblue) as that would have made a big difference to the mass market installation problem by reducing the skill needed by installers. Tooway satellite installers wanted.

26 inch diameter Ka band VSAT antenna

Indoor customer Surfbeam modem from ViaSat,

Eurobird 3 Spot D Downlink eirp contours

Eurobird 3 Spot D Downlink eirp contours
Eurobird 3 Spot D Uplink G/T contours - relevant to operation on Albania, Greece, Turkey area + elsewhere

Hotbird 6 Ka band downlink beam
Tooway ™ Ka band downlink beam coverage - Hotbird 6 at 13 deg east

Hotbird 6 Ka band uplink spot beams
Tooway ™ Ka band uplink spot beam coverage - Hotbird 6 at 13 deg east

Back for Tooway ™ satellite discussion forum. European VSAT satellite service providers European resellers include Bentley Walker and El Molino

Eutelsat send out Press releases from time to time and I am sent information by Bentley Walker and El Molino to help me put informative information here.

Page started 1 May 2009 Page last amended 3 May 2009