Tooway satellite in Europe

Tooway Satellite: Low cost European satellite internet access service

Tooway is a VSAT satellite communication system from Skylogic, Italy, for domestic and small business customers to enable them to connect to the internet from remote location.  Retail cost is approx £25 - £90 per month, depending on download plus upload traffic amounts (4 - 80 Gbytes),  The outdoor satellite dish and transmit/receive electronics plus the indoor Docsis ViaSat Surfbeam modem costs about £120.  Headline advertised download bit rates offered are up to 6, 8 and 10 Mbit/s. Upload speeds: Up to 1, 2 or 4 Mbit/s.   Speeds and amounts of Mbytes transferred (down and up) are interrelated, with quotas related to tariff charged.  These quotas comprise traffic amounts applied to periods one hour, four hours, one day, one week and four weeks.  The time periods restart every 5 minutes and are called Sliding Time Windows (STW).

Due to cost considerations it is recommended that you first consider any available terrestrial wired system (telephone wire based ADSL or cable) or terrestrial wireless (WIFI, WiMAX etc) before choosing the satellite option as a last resort. The majority of satellite users are people in remote locations or where the terrestrial phone company infrastructure is unable to make ADSL work well. 

The Tooway system is operated on the Eutelsat KA-SAT satellite by Skylogic from a number of teleport hub antennas throughout Europe. The main Skylogic teleport earth station teleport is in Italy,  The Tooway service has been operating since 2008 in both Ku band, on Eurobird 3 satellite, and also on a four spot, Ka beam package on Hotbird 6.  The new Ka-SAT satellite, launched Dec 2010 is dedicated to Tooway and has 83 spot beams covering Europe, North Africa and parts of the Middle East.  These small spot beams will expand the existing Tooway Ka band service on Hotbird 6.   Ka-SAT is located at 9 deg east orbital longitude position.

Ka band refers to use of the 20/30 GHz frequency bands.  These high microwave frequencies are severely susceptible to rain attenuation. To minimise the inconvenience and disruption to customers, the modulation and coding techniques used are altered to adapt to the changing weather conditions so as far as possible to maintain service, even if the bit rate is slowed somewhat. Customer terminals, if well pointed, normally operate with a power output lower than their maximum so as to provide an up-link power control range to help maintain uplink connection during rain.

Many local, national or pan-European service providers/resellers exist throughout Europe whose role is to help customers with equipment installation and maintenance - plus collecting the money to help pay for the system. Many service providers/resellers trade Europe-wide so you don't need to feel obliged to go to your local company if you have heard of better technical support from other companies. Self installation is encouraged, particularly in remote locations, to keep costs to the customer down.  If you have technical problems you may always discuss them here in this website in my Tooway satellite internet Forum.

This traffic quota graphic shows the actual status of a customer site that has exceeded its weekly 800 Mbytes allowance (see red bar).  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. When considering alternative service providers ask if they can give you on-line access to details of your current traffic quota status as it is important that you know where you stand if you are to avoid being unexpectedly slowed down.  It would help everyone if you made an effort to try to understand the traffic quota system for your selected tariff  - it is for your benefit - to share out the available satellite capacity fairly according to how much you pay per month. Try to schedule large file transfers such as software updates, video downloads, batch emails with large attachments etc during the night when traffic amounts count as half.

The Tooway network is based on the Wildblue system of the USA

KA-SAT was successfully launched on 26 Dec 2010

KA-SAT uses 27.5-29.5 GHz for the uplinks from the hub gateway earth stations.
KA-SAT uses 29.5-30 GHz for the uplinks from the customer VSAT terminals.
KA-SAT uses 17.7-19.7 GHz for the downlinks to the hub gateway earth stations.
KA-SAT uses 19.7-20.2 GHz for the downlinks to the customer VSAT terminals.

2009:  This European Ka band satellite internet access service is called Tooway and is a service provided by Eutelsat via their teleport operator agent Skylogic in Italy. It will help make use of the Ka band transponder payload capacity on the Hotbird 6 satellite at 13 deg east longitude and is intended to provide a cost effective solution to the problem of providing satellite internet access for people in remote areas who cannot get ADSL or cable broadband.  The service will be very similar to Wildblue/Telesat service that has been provided in the US and Canada for several years with great success. 

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.

Contact click >  sales@bentleywalker.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 peak speeds are offered with corresponding tariffs. The system incorporates an integrated performance enhancing proxy (PEP) with pre-fetch to speed up browsing and downloads.

Ka band frequency plan on HotBird 6 satellite showing downlink transponder and uplink spot beam transponders.
Note the beacon frequency is 19701 MHz, Horizontal nominal polarisation.
It is not known if this 'Horizontal' is in fact parallel with the equator or tilted 3.5 deg.

All Spanish and French terminals receive the same downstream that is the French one as downlink coverage is the same for both K153 (Spanish) and K159 (French) transponder.  The difference is that Spanish terminals will transmit on K153 while French ones will transmit on K159 as the uplink has a different coverage.

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 eliminating the need for skilled installers. Tooway satellite installers wanted.

For dish pointing for these satellites go to Tooway dish pointing  Satellite dish pointing UK  Germany  Spain  France   Algeria   Greece   Italia

Future plans by Eutelsat are for a dedicated Ka band satellite, called KA_SAT.  This will have multiple Ka band spot beams and cover Europe in a more comprehensive fashion.  Launch date: 26 Dec 2010.

From 1st July 2009 the speed of the Tooway satellite broadband service will be increased to (up to) 3.6 Mbps from (up to) 2 Mbps. Maximum uplink speeds have also increased to 384 kbps for all customers. In addition, overnight usage (FAP) volumes will be discounted by 50% between midnight and 6am GMT to reward use of the satellite network at times of traditional low usage. Following launch of KA-SAT satellite in Dec 2010, satellite broadband download speeds are expected to be raised to up to 10Mbps.

Other relevant links:  Skylogic Tooway brochure 5.4 Mbytes pdf file       Eutelsat/ViaSat press release 46 kbytes pdf file.

Page started 31 Jan 2008.   Page last amended 17 Jan 2011

Tooway service providers.

Service offered now is  available on KA-SAT (9 east) with coverage of all Europe plus parts of North Africa and the Middle East.

Service resellers:

Bentley Walker

Europe Satellite

ToowayDirect

Ormesat (North Wales)

Legacy systems still operate in Europe and North Africa on beam coverages provided by Hotbird 6 Ka band and Eurobird 3 for Ku band: