Hello. I started looking for a satellite broadband provider quite a while ago when our main dsl connection failed for a few days. We are based in London. I want to set up a secondary load balanced wan link in our office for redundancy and failover that is not dependent on terrestrial cabling. But I am totally confused by the whole satellite provider market. I don't know what criteria to use when choosing a provider. I actually placed an order with someone but nothing came of it! I just never heard back from them. I've been talking to Tariam and they seem pretty keen but, for me, it's pricey. It will only be a backup connection so I don't need bells and whistles. Who to go for? If you've had a great experience please let me know. Thanks in advance.

Malc

You can choose dedicated or shared service.

Dedicated service will cost around £4000 per month for 200k up and 800k down.

Shared service is proportionally very much less per month, depending on your traffic and the number of other sites sharing the same satellite capacity.   There are obviously limits on the amount of traffic transferred and congestion at times.

Consider what you need in terms of bit rates and data transferred.  Note that actual average bit rates can be as low as 2 kbit/s up and 10kbit/s down per PC connected.

See here for some suggested europe satellite internet service providers.

Best regards, Eric.

Hi Eric, thanks for that. It would have to be a shared service. And, as I say, a secondary load-balanced connection. I've got  a load balancing router and I'm not afraid to use it! It would also be used for smtp failover in the event that the dsl goes down again. But I'm a bit in the dark about the contention ratio. I've been told it can be, or is normally 375:1 for a home package. But is the one link ever likely to be shared by that many people at this time given that satellite broadband is not that common?

Malc

What you really want is a business continuity plan. This way you pay a low monthly to have the service on stand-by and then when it does fail-over you only pay on a per day basis. Check out www.isosat.net. The have Business Continuity solutions.