How well does Tooway perform?

Hi

I am looking at getting a two way satellite system as I am unable to get broadband any other way.

I have read on this forum some of the difficulties with the installation of the system which does raise some concerns.

What I am interested in primarily is those users out there who have go it going how well is it performing? Is the speed on upload and download constant during the day? Does it drop out at all? If it does drop out are there any factors that can be attributed to the drop out? Does the Grade of Service actually kick in and what effect does this have and how do you know if you have hit it (other than everything grinding to a halt!)?

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

The Tooway Fair Access Policy (FAP), as applied by Skylogic, is described here:
https://www.satsig.net/tooway/tooway-grade-of-service-2009.pdf

Best regards, Eric.

Hello ChasN
regarding the installation of the system, I would say it was fairly easy for anyone capable of drilling 'secure' holes in masonry.

I feel the key to the whole process is accuracy.

There are two areas that need to be really accurate:

1. Making sure the dish mounting pole is absolutely plumb vertical in all directions - then you needn't get involved in adjusting direction settings to compensate.

2. Alignment of the dish itself, which is straightforward provided time is taken to be absolutely certain of the Azimuth setting you set the dish at to begin with.
The Elevation and Polarity settings are easy as they can be set on the dish calibration markings (I'm sure there's a better word for that!).

Also, I'd say it would be much harder without a meter such as the Horizon MiniSat, which I found worked brilliantly.

HTH
Sean

Hi

Have these issues now been resolved and if so how is Tooway performing now?

Thanks

Having been a user of TooWay for more than 3 months, I have gained a fair idea of its strengths and weaknesses as it affects my usage.

If you need 10Mb/s. cable or 8Mb/s. ADSL via phone line, then a move to a city is advised. Similarly, video etc downloads will cause FAP to kick-in. In my case, living in a very rural area with a repeatedly unreliable dial-up (3 breaks in the 'phone line for 2 days each, over the last 2 months), TooWay is a real boon.

My on-line speeds are usually good being around 1600Kb/s down and 180Kb/s upload (ThinkBroadband, formerly ADSL Guide), giving very usable email and web browsing/downloads. Sometimes there is noticeable speed deterioration perhaps due to contention but nothing too serious.

The expected susceptibility of Ka band to rain fade has not proved as bad as I had feared, heavy rain to the south can sometimes cause the connection to drop but re-connection is usually only a few minutes away. It does cope with surprisingly heavy rain though rather better than I thought initially.

Certain web pages loading slowly have been reported by others and this is noticeable on my system too. My usage pattern involves monitoring a number of sites regularly and these are bookmarked in my browser (Firefox 3.0.1) caching and pre-fetching are presumably allowing  rapid loading of these. New sites can be much slower.

I knew that latency was a feature of satellite technology but I have been surprised by the extent of this. It is very noticeable and if I ping www.bbc.co.uk or similar, I get a period ranging between 1200ms. and 2000ms. This is approximately double what I would have expected based on the laws of physics. I note that WildBlue users complain of almost exactly this degree of delay and some have suggested that it is a deliberate traffic handling mechanism. If true, I wonder if this could also apply to TooWay?

If I had to award marks for my user experience I would give 10/10 for ease of use, once set up, it really is "plugnplay". Performance and reliability would score 8/10, There are still some issues to be resolved but most outages appear to be weather related. Value for money I would give 9/10. For people in my situation, I believe it is very good value, I would certainly buy it again if cable or phone line ADSL were unavailable.

Good support is given by Bentley Walker, raising an issue brings a rapid reply from James although as a re-seller not the Teleport/service provider, their freedom of action to resolve problems rapidly is perhaps restricted.

The above are my own opinions based on my home usage and therefore may not be applicable to others.

Regards,

Tony

The noise temperature of the quiet sun at Ku and Ka band is about the same 10,000K so the effects will be similar to Ku band but the higher frequency 19.8 GHz will make the beamwidth narrower than for Ku band, assuming same size dishes.

If anyone is interested in making receive observations at Ka band please say your lat/long location and dish diameter and I will try to make a prediction.

Guess for mid Wales and Hotbird 13E (Ka band Tooway):

Worst day, when the satellite crosses directly across the middle of the sun: 12th October 2008 Start 12:35:00 GMT for approx 15 minutes.   Less effect around the same time for 5 days before and 5 days after, at about the same time.

Best regards, Eric.

Hi

I have just installed a Tooway system in the South of France, Setting it up was quite straight forward.

Personally I am disappointed with the upload times which are coming in about 50- 60kbps on average. I am with Tariam and they also say' they are looking into it' and 'You are the only one experiencing this slow speed'... yeah right! I use Speedtest.net to check my speeds and the results for my IP 88.202.126.40 (Skylogic SPA) going back to April 2008 can be found on:

https://www.speedtest.net/

Also they say that they provide a free SMTP e-mail account. No they don't.

Latency is averaging out about 1100-1200ms.

Personally I think there is a case for misrepresentation on the upload speeds.

For download speed of a web page try this:
https://www.satsig.net/speed-test/speed-tester.htm
It includes four sets of about 30k bytes and is representative of a web page.  You won't get results much above 2 Mbit/s since I have a 2 Mbit/s total aggregate traffic limiter on the output of the satsig server.

Regarding upload speed try sending a 1 Mbyte (8 Mbits) image file as an attachment to an email and count the seconds needed to send it.

Note that a 1 Mbyte file will get sent as a series of short packets and each packet has an overhead of packet header etc.  The modem may incorporate accelleration techniques to minimise this overhead and avoid delay checking that each packet arrives safely.

The Tooway Ka band 384 kbit/s uplink carrier is the actual bit rate for all uplink bursts, but the hub receiver will be TDMA time shared with uplink bursts coming from the other sites.  You normally transmit for less than 1% of the time.  If you send a big file the hub NMS may allocate you a more or less contiguous block(s) of uplink burst time slots so as to get the whole file sent reasonably quickly.  If no one else is busy at the time you will probably get near to the full throughput.   This might apply to a burst lasting for a whole second or more, 384 kbits or 48k bytes per second.
wxw
Best regards, Eric.

Hi,

I have just run 3 speedtests within 2 minutes:

Speedtest.net 3100/101
wugnet.com 1840/120
thinkbroadband.com 1642/217

ok you guys have got to take a break here!
you are getting 1500+ and you're complaining? and how much do you pay? I bet its not more than what i pay for my iDirect service.

I shell out to BW more than you pay for your Tooway and i BARELY get 500kbps ... i am lucky if i hit 900 at night! if i ever complain i get slapped with the GoS.

seriously. relax. you arent being ripped off

and as far as skylogic. i'll say it out loud. Skylogic is crap! they dont know how to run their network.
when i was on am22/(U.K. hub --dont know who runs it) i was blazing through web sites ... the difference between skylogic (w6) and the UK hub (am22) is like night and day.
i wont go into detail about why BW plays the "we dont know" role. you get to find out this info on your own.
in other words -- dont kid yourself. THEY KNOW whats going on and THEY KNOW you're having problems.

I've worked tech support for 10 years and I know all the tricks.

Thank you!

I installed a TooWay system a few weeks ago at my site in southern Spain and I must admit I am very impressed so far with the performance. Of course some people are never happy and I can see a few complaints on the forum but I feel that given that satellite broadband has always had its drawbacks the DOCSIS system is performing well.

And as some additional info; after reading a few negative comments regarding upload speeds I decided to carry out my own additional testing.  I have found that, regardless of what the speed test sites may say, when uploading biggish files the Ka band TX is performing more or less to spec (at least in my case anyway)

Best regards,
Scott Macdonald

Seems to me that your supplier has a responsability to ensure that you get what you paid for. Without a doubt the system is not cheap (albeit much cheaper than other comparable satellite systems it still continues to be expensive in comparison with the available terrestrial broadband options) hence you expect what you paid for.

My experience is that during bad weather the lock can be lost. This in my opinion would create problems for installations in climates prone to a lot of rain so I question the Ka band vialbility in the UK. That said you say your problem is occuring during clear blue skies and in any case as I understand it you are not losing the lock on the satellite but suffering extremely low data rates.

As I mentioned my experience has been good and I did a self install (which as you correctly mention was not easy) so I cannot explain why you are having so many problems. My data rates are good (and I use it everyday) although to be honest I only use skype for IM not VoIP. I do connect to my office via the company VPN and it always works fine (albeit a little slower).

The suppler has an obligation to ensure that the system works for you. Unfortunately of course in self install situations then we as users tend to get blamed for the problems but I would be firm and insist that they resolve the issue.

Good luck,
Scott

Hi,

Don't know about the rest of you but my signal has totally disappeared, one minute it was there and then nothing, no wind or rain, blue sky no cloud. Rebooted the modem and it is is giving me the 1, 2, 3 flashes but will not do the 4. Thank God I have not ditched my dial-up yet!!

The Tooway uplink carrier (Ka band 384 kbit/s) is the actual bit rate for all uplink bursts, but the hub receiver will be TDMA time shared with uplink bursts coming from the other sites.  You normally transmit for less than 1% of the time.  If you send a big file the hub NMS may allocate you a more or less contiguous block(s) of uplink burst time slots so as to get the whole file sent reasonably quickly.  If no one else is busy at the time you will probably get near to the full throughput.   This might apply to a burst lasting for a whole second or more, 384 kbits or 48k bytes per second. [/quote]

The Tooway Fair Access Policy (FAP), as applied by Skylogic.

This policy includes a Section 6 which is very interesting.  It says:

6) The Fair Information Policy (FIP) Information given to subscriber

• Instantaneous real time information (Push)
– Network congestion (FAP active or not)
– FAPed or not
– Punished or not

• Information on a web site (Pull)
– Account status
– Remaining Volume / Volume available
– FAP status

It is clearly the intention of Skylogic to provide real time data and web interface to the end user subscriber providing them with the information stated.    I have received an email saying that Skylogic "are working on it"

Best regards, Eric.

I woke up this morining, and did a speed test and I would appear to be out of the penalty box. (If I was ever in it - although I think I was)

Quite happy to see even in the penalty box speed seems usable - surprising considering they went down as low as double dialup... but good. Maybe they only throttle certain traffic like it mentioned in the FAP rules. Thats why the downloads reported slow speed but web browsing remains fast.

probably worth doing any big downloads at night before bed, so that if you enter the box it will have time to recover by morning!

Tooway has gone ultra slow like it did last week. We are talking 5 minutes to open a page kind of thing.

Weather could not be better, blue skys no wind whatsoever looks like its the same in Turin.

Strange... this happened at roughly the same time last saturday and lasted till midday Tuesday. I hope it doesn't last that long this time.
Anyone else getting this in the green belt?

Alex

Torture! 8 mins to load this page. Speed so slow that the broadband speed testers time out and can't give me a reading. This must be an all time low!

Woweee. I just did a speed test and I am at an all time high -

3434 kbps down (beat that!)
224 kbps up
743 ms latency (this is a little higher than I have been getting)

It seems to me that every time I experience these terrible speed patches - when it comes back its faster.  good stuff!

I'm back to average! A fine 1820 down but a sluggish 128 up, and a noticeable delay in browsing. Come on, give the Tooway hamster a poke and get it cranked back up!

Hi I am in the UK Tariam is provider.  Still down - exceptionally slow speeds.

Thanks Eric and Cambrian, of course I do and will notify my provider! I am just sharing my expereince here to see if this problem is widespread or if it is just me. Also it seems like the provider is reliant on skylogic to respond, which can take days.

It is back on full speed again now and as I have said in previous posts when it works it works really well - Actually above expectations.

I would say its about 65-75% reliable at the moment the rest of the time it just crawls for no discernible reason.  Also when it does work I am posting some of the fastest speeds here! I actually had 3mbps last night.

Cambrian, you seem very content with your connection -and I am happy for you! Personally I would like to see it more like 95-99% reliable ! Weather conditions is understandable but often it just stops regardless.

Having spoken to my provider the last time I had this trouble he confirmed I was not under any fap restrictions - it does say (I think bold or underlined) that FAP will not kick in UNLESS the network is congested, it can't be congested 4 months after launch surely? I am not a p2p / movie download freak either its just web development and rdp.

Anyway we will see if it improves - it should be more reliable than this IMHO.

Personally I find the information from Aealean and others extremely helpful. Firstly it shows that the irratic behaviour of the system is not isolated to me , and secondly it gives more weight to my feedback to BW. It means I can't be fobbed off with the excuse that I am the only one experiencing problems. Like the others I am happy with the speeds when they are there but can see no correlation with the downtimes and weather or any other pattern. Saturday was virtually unusable but Sunday was great. I hope the information leads to a stable solution.

I am so glad to have found this forum!

I am recently on a trial period with the Too-Way system and boy has it been a trial so far! Initially I was pleased to be getting 1800-1900mbps/ download (through www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk although I now realise it is probably more accurate to use the checker on this site) with 150+ mbps UPLOAD. I was watching youtube videos, browsing the bbc news site and even downloading some updates for my Apple at a healthy 150k/s.

This installation took place a couple of weeks ago on the 1/10/08, it took days to get the activation code through but it was as I say a pleasant experience to begin with, this was on the Friday night (3rd October.) I came home from work having activated it earlier and at about 7pm it just totally died down to a crawl. The next morning it was right back up again then later that weekend died to a crawl. Then the blinking receive light came on and it would not lock to the satellite. I wondered if it was due to heavy rain, I hoped not as we seem to get a lot of this don't we? I live in the SE of England incidentally.

My installer came back the following week and repositioned it and got a better signal, again I was off and everything was running fine.

I wish that I had written a diary of events but suffice it to say that I have been experiencing exactly the same issues as the people writing here. There was a week where it just kept losing its track on the signal, that now seems to have disappeared and I have a consistent IP address DHCPd to me but it is either working really well, or takes 2 minutes just to get a www.google.co.uk page up!

I am currently trying to get my provider to talk to SkyLogic, I am assuming that I have fallen into some form of penalty due to fair use policy though I can't imagine why. I have the bronze package which should give me 2Gb download a month and there's no way I could have reached that.

Incidentally, I have switched off all automatic downloads on both my Apple Mac as well as WinXp and Vista machines - they have not received updates for quite some months so could kill my monthly limit in one fell-swoop! I suggest others do the same?

Sorry for the lengthy post but it feels good to share my thoughts, I am so pi**ed off I cannot tell you. I need this connection for work (as well as general browsing) and when paying £50-60 a month expect a whole lot more! I went to this system after having a one-way for some months - this was up and down too, losing connection, having to re-dial etc. etc. I was praying for a better experience this time when paying 3 times the amount!

Does anybody have any experience with trying to connect to work VPNs with this technology? I managed to connect to work though this took forever. Everything is just super slllooooow, I have tested my laptop with it's VPN connection on an ADSL based 2mb link and it works really well. I know that satellite has these enromous latency issues, can anyone tell me if it is unlikely my VPN will ever work through this link?

Finally, I have the grade of service document and I cannot see any issue in looking at youtube occassionally or other streaming based services, as long as I don't hit my overall monthly limit why should I be getting penalised!

Thanks Frits,

I had my dish pointed by a pro, with 20 years experience, and as I said when it works it works really really well... I can't stress this enough. Last week my average download speed could not have been below 2.3 mbps and adveage up was above 200 kbps. latency 6-700ms.

It was pretty consistent for about 4 days. This indicates to me that there is nothing wrong with my pointing or cables, would you agree? My cables were cut to size as there was a lot of extra, my provider assures me that this is not a problem, is this correct?

Again weather is not the issue, It was down a good part of saturday and most of sunday which was one of the nicest days we have had in ages. No wind, blue skies lovely. It has been off all day today a bit overcast but nothing unusual.

It seems that there is a disproportionate ammount of people in the UK having this issue - what would really help is if Skylogic aknowledged this rather than leaving us all in the dark. This lack of information would not be acceptable in any other industry!

Couple of points from the last few postings.
1) I got BW to test my setup, after it was suggested that it was my setup that had the problem rather then the system. They came back and confirmed that my setup was 100% spot on and that there was no issue. I am still having the same problems as the others in this forum so therefore I must assume it is the system.
2) In the "Tooway Crawling" discussion , page 2, there is a diagram that shows Spain on a blue loop and Uk on a green loop. So I assume our problems in the UK are different to those in Spain.
3) When I was investigating setting up the dish etc I was repeatedly told to have a minimum cable length of 30m between the dish and the modem box. I queried this a lot as I couldn't see how it would help or hinder. But the end answer from BW and others was not to go below 25m of cable for each .
4) I live in wales and my LNB is on the roof, it rains so much here that I can't wipe the LNB after a shower or I'd be permanently up a ladder!!
Cheers all,

Could you clarify - the minimum of 25m length cable? is that each cable what is the need for this?

My provider insists  this is not neccesary , I will push him again on this point. IMHO I would have thought it would be the other way round, a maximum of 25m cable? Doesnt signal weaken with length..as I say no official mention of anything like this in the manual .

Of course if it will magically solve all of my problems I will gleefully pull out the cable on the wall and reinstall afresh! Welshbarn, Tea please comment how long is your cable?

Can you imagine how inconvenient it would be if every product was designed in this way ! Your telephone / fax / modem / router all had to have min length cables!  hilarious!

Regards,

Alex

My dish is at the other end of a long building where my end-point modem is sited so it is definitely greater than 25 metres in length. I agree with comments about cable length - I have never heard of a cable having to be long rather than short, surely signals degrade over a longer distance!

I just discovered from my supplier (Micronet Broadband) that I have been penalised and therefore in the FUP (fair use policy) though I should now be outside of it as of late yesterday. Both last night and this morning I experienced what is becoming the norm with this service which is that one moment I have very usable speeds, websites appear rapidly and so on, then literally 30 seconds later it just crawls. It can take minutes just to get a google page up.

It is running well at the moment however, though I have no confidence in it whatsoever and I'm sure that the slow down has nothing to do with FUP at times, and certainly NOTHING to do with the weather.

I have some very intersting info on FUP however, this was sent my Micronet Broadband to me as information on what constitues overuse of the service:

Below is your statistics, it seems you went over your weekly threshold for the bronze package, but it should now be out of FUP and your speed should be back now as the system shows, if you don't download for a day or so the speed comes back.
 
Every hour you do not download it 53MB  (which is the hourly threshold which explains you seeing the speed drop off on your download speeds while you where watching it) is taken off your weekly threshold of 800MB, you only just went over the weekly threshold of 800MB
 
On the Silver package you get 1.2GB as a 1 week threshold rather than 800MB and a much higher hourly, daily threshold and a 3GB monthly threshold.
 
You can use the graph below as a guide to your thresholds

 
I would suggested installing a software such as Netmeter to check your traffic amounts: https://www.metal-machine.de/readerror/index.php?action=tpmod;dl=item14
 
Using the netmeter See if your normal usage is sufficient for the bronze package, if not its advisable to  move to the higher package.
 
I was quite shocked by this. I knew I had a 2gb limit, I did not know that we had an HOURLY limit however. I downloaded an 80Mb file last week which at 150k/s came down within minutes, ie. within the hour - I watched my speed decrease as the download went on about 10k/s every 2 seconds until after a few moments I was down to 8k/s! This was obviously because FUP kicked in.

I have downloaded the nettools and did some quick tests last night during odd minutes where the service actually worked. It may be of interest to note that the front page of news.bbc.co.uk uses about 5-600kb of data alone. More serious is that every time you use the www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk it downloads 5-6MB in it's test! Over a few days repeatedly testing with this you could use up a fair portion of your monthly limit, so be careful!

I'm not sure what to do right now to be honest, I am measuring my limits to ensure no FUP but it still slows down to a crawl anyway from time to time, I think the network has some serious issues and I am not paying anything yet, or possibly ever.

I think we all need to band together here because all I hear is the "No one else i complaining" thing which is complete rubbish. I am getting quite angry now...

Firstly about the 30m cables, I know it sounds particularly dumb - which is why I queried it with everyone I could find! But the Bentley Walker guide actually mentioned it in the first place (it wasn't something I dreamed up), and I went back to them  as I initially wanted to check that it wasn't a maximum amount. They agreed that 30 min is recommended for each of the TX and RX. However they also said that 25m would be fine as I had a 50m roll and didn't want to buy more. Never found out exactly why, but it is what is recommended.
Next issue is the speeds etc. Well I started with the satellite over 3months ago and it was dreadful. I was regularly on speeds of less than 50 up. I have moaned an awful lot to BW to try and sort this out. My main issue was the delay in load time of web pages. I carried out a series of tests over an extended period and stuff like the BBC site would take upto a minute to load. About 2 to 3 weeks ago thinks definately started to improve , the load lag has reduced and the up times did increase to about 200. However this has now started to creep down again , and its around 150 today. It is however , noticeable better than it was 3 months ago.
As for the FAP , BW have not provided me with stats but I am now apparently on the Silver package and shouldn't be hitting anywhere near the rerstrictions. I don't use anything like Voip or even video. I just look at web pages and upload work files to base, none of which are massive. Occasionally I download updates and software.  If you ask me to rate it overall, i would say when it is good - it's great, but sadly the good times are not very consistent.  My downtimes seem to co-incide with yours.
As for users, there are NOT thousands in the UK. BW did tell me 3 months ago that I was one of 2 or 3 in Wales.
And finally , as for region, I believe I am about 20 miles from one of the other users Cambrian.

Hello BW
I'm afraid I find your posting disingenuous - you're dodging the issue here. Most of the UK users on this forum are suffering from loss of service, unresponsiveness, low speeds and general unreliability.
For you to comment that you found it OK on holiday in France is neither convincing nor helpful.

Your comment that this is to be expected from a Satellite Service is misleading.
I also have a SkyDSL satellite system (ie; dial-up uplink and 1 Gb down) which for internet browsing outperforms Tooway easily and everytime, particularly on responsiveness and uptime. The exception to this is for large file downloads.

I think it's time you guys began to take part in an active programme of assessment and assistance with a view to improving this service, on a one to one basis if appropriate, rather than making the occasional obtuse passing comments.

Bearing in mind the cost of this service, I think your company's attitude up to this point is rather lamentable.

Sean

Read GOS  = Done that.
Monitor your own traffic = Done That
Use quality cables+connectors = Done That
Make sure pointing is 200% right = Done That.

I still don't think the UK system is working properly.
What country are your installations in?

Thanks for those comments, have you read the FAP document?

I thought  that it said it would slow down to 10% of the max speed, which would be about 200kbps. This is still broadband and would be perfectly usable and acceptable to me. I was clearly told by the salesman that under FAP the speeds drop to 200kps or such. This seems to be backed up in the FAP guide but that document is quite hard to decipher.

Even if it slowed down to 60kbps it would be perfectly usable ! I am frequently in the far east on slower connections and can get by... We are talking about 5 minutes to load google .. OK. Really, really slow. Dial Up is an absolute joy in comparison.

I have just called Tarriam and its more excuses...takes 2 days to respond to an email and then they say all of the other 1000 customers are fine...  they now that say I am in FAP territory thats why its slow. I am on the 3gb package.. I would be prepared to shell out the extra monthly sub (gold) if I could guarantee it would work... but so far I have very little confidence in this system.

Last week I was told after 3 days of EXACTLY the same lack of service that I had NOT entered the penalty box at all ever. The excuse then was pointing, he even tried to blame my router.... oh he also tried the weather too.

Excuses, excuses.. excuses... I am so sick of this. Pissed off is a very gentle way of putting it.

Quote:


Thanks Sean, I totally agree. Quite frankly I would rather have a reliable service at 256kbps that worked than this constant up and down. I have not been able to use it  at all for the last 3 days.

Thanks for your comments re: Tariam, I dont think I will bother calling / emailing them for help again. It just upsets me, as you say you may as well ask the cat! They have misled me the entire journey which makes this whole exercise more frustrating!

I am certain that this service does not fit in with trade descriptions, and I am certain I could easily take action here. I  paid for this by credit card so that offers a lot of protection.

Not sure how much longer I can put up with this. At the end of my tether here!

I am sorry to disagree Sean but try Googling GOS Sliding Time Window. It has also been linked on here by El Molino I seem to recall.

The graph on page 6 clearly shows 25MB bites in 1 hour periods and the recovery time. I am not a legal person but but nasty as it is, it seems to be a fact of life.

Regards,

Tony

Quote:


Hello Tony
how's it going?
No need to be sorry about disagreeing! I'm very happy to be proved wrong at any time, but so far I have seen no evidence that I, and the other complainants, are wrong in maintaining our service, as received, is not up to spec.

The key point is described under the FAP rules - the FAP is only triggered when the network is overloaded.
Welshbarn has had confirmation from BW that the FAP has not yet been triggered on their account.

Cheers
Sean

I was told that I had not gone into FAP.
So I take that to mean that I have not gone over my allowance.
So I am not overloading the network.
So why do I experience the slow death so regularly?

Ok, I'm home now and testing the connection. One minute it is working fine, the next I can't even pull up my google home page. This is not some kind of Fair Use Policy kicking in, this is a complete disruption of the service.

Unlike others on here who have spoken of reasonable browsing experiences even during slow downs, I am either full speed or virtually nothing.

There is something wrong with this system full stop, I think we should all stop making excuses about solar flares, rain drops, short/long cables and so on, we are paying for a useless service here.

Please re-read my posting from before regarding the hourly download limits, does anyone have any thoughts on this? This will stop you ever downloading say a huge update, let alone video file or something.

I really don't know what to do next to be honest but I'm not paying a penny at the moment and will try and extend my trial period. I have already been stung for hundreds of wasted pounds with the one-way system I had, that was worse than useless and regularly disconnected at the modem end of the SkyDSL box, or worse stayed connected at the phone line but the DSL box lost it's IP so that I could no longer ping it. Aaaaagggghh. I really hoped that the extra expense of this system would mean a reliable service....

Quote:


Contact you supplier and try to solve it with him. Its useless to post "same" complains all over and over in this forum, it does not solve it

Quote:


Sorry but if we were getting satisfactory results from our respective providers  /  sky logic / isp then we would not be posting here in the first place. We would never have sought this forum out,  we would simply be happy in our remote locations enjoying fast RELIABLE broadband. So no. Its not useless to share our experiences here!

As far as FAP goes, I have not used the system since Sunday. I have a dual WAN router so the satellite system simply has not been in use (it is far too slow) so there is no traffic being used.

According to my provider I am in the FAP box, how can I still be in the box if I haven’t used it? The provider also promised to send me my usage report twice (update 3 times) but it still has not arrived – let’s face it it’s just another excuse because the system does not work.

Cambrian, I think you are totally wrong – this definitely goes foul of trade descriptions. It is simply not fit for purpose. It is supposed to slow down. The GOS is intentionally vague and it does not tell you how slow it will go – I was told verbally 10% or 200kbps ** Even if it slowed down to 1% it would be faster than the speeds I am currently getting **  which are unusable.

The providers in this forum keep bleating to us to read the GOS! Well maybe they should read it:

Intended nominal service
When not under FAP conditions (limitations) the user could expect:
1. A minimum of 50% of the peak Speed 90% of the time
2. A Minimum of 20% of peak speed 95% of the time
3. Applications Web Browsing and mail services
4. Very low speed and priority on all peer to peer applications

As I say it takes minutes to load Google – I have been unable to use it for days. Provider has stopped answering the phone and doesn’t reply to emails. When they do answer the phone they just make another excuse.

Last week he had a moment of truthfullness and told me that I was not in the FAP box and that all of their customers were complaining - he said that they were at the mercy of SkyLogic and were not sure if they could continue selling this product because of all the complaints.

This week he is saying I am in the FAP box - I still haven't seen the report he promised.

Now I understand why they are so keen on self installs! So they can constantly point the finger when the service doesn’t work. It seems like this has been made into an art form!

BTW> ChasN is all of this answering your question?

I am sorry that the relations with your provider have become so acrimonious, not being kept informed always leads to anger in my experience.

There really does not seem to be anything un-toward going on with the network at the moment other than a "mid-day slow down" possibly.

My test result now is :-

     15/10/08 14:43:34
Speed Down      1894.55 Kbps ( 1.9 Mbps )
Speed Up      150.72 Kbps ( 0.1 Mbps )
Port      8095
Server      speedtest1.adslguide.org.uk

About usual for the time of day. I really wonder whether you also have an equipment fault, I have never known such HIGH speeds as you have quoted in the past only to be followed by a dismal crawl.

Hope things can be put back on track for you.

Regards,

Tony

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I think its time to stop complaining ! Ship everything back to Tariam and use your old system.

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We selling more than 6 different systems, for home use, enterprises and military projects ! from different hardware suppliers and different satellite/bandwidth suppliers. All using FAB and more or less the same policy. If you don't want to read, don't want to understand, yes you will have a problem forever using satellite systems for communication, there are rules we all have to accept and they make sure we all get a fair part of the bandwidth (in this case very reliable top quality and very cheap !!!!!!!) Like I said, send it back (maybe you have faulthy hardware, ask them to test it) and use your old fashion perfect working landline !

We installed last week "only" 5 systems and they are all perfect up and running. Maybe because we inform our users 200% upfront about "-" and "+" of a system.

This is my last reply on this discussion, at least from my side (it becomes a bit waisted time). Btw. my name is Frits Blomsma.