NEW one way ISP - sateline.com

I don't believe it.

4 Mbit/s unlimited will cost around $28,000 per month to provide.   A price of $95 per month suggests you will need about 295 people all sharing the 4 Mbit/s with an actual average per site of 13 kbit/s ?

Since an average of 10 kbit/s is the normal demand from a single low useage PC, such a service could be quite satisfactory if a fair access policy was applied to ensure each user gets their fair share.   You need to limit the total traffic per minute, per 5 minutes, per hour, per 5 hours, per day, per week, per month (for example) and if such rolling limits are exceeded then apply temporary speed restrictions.  This way each site get a chance for the high 4 Mbit/s bit rate, but for limited periods of time, depending on their tariff.

Please avoid using the word "unlimited" unless it is true.

Best regards, Eric.

What Eric states here is the real price for the dedicated CIR bandwidth. It's all near or less the same. What Sateline is offering is burstable bandwidth because it is sharing a single space segment pool with multiple customers.

I've been watching for the 1-way DVB/IP-based satellite Internet world since the very early ages of Europe Online (EOL). The problem with most of these 1-way satellite ISPs is that they are offering so called "unlimited packages" but once their networks get crowded things are starting to crawl. There are myriads of examples I can provide here - starting from the EOL itself, StarSpeeder, E-Sat, NTV+, early Plenexis SkyBooster-based services, ... All these businesses are now either bankrupt or migrated to a limited traffic business model.

By implementing smart bandwidth management algorithms and limiting the amount of traffic each user can pass, the satellite ISP can still maintain a fair quality of service at the very affordable cost. In fact, this is exactly what is happening with the Sateline. I have took time to see what they offer:

Classic packages: These are limited traffic packages with additional traffic charged on a per-MB basis. The cheapest service does not include any traffic at all and you are being charged right from the start. The 50-dollar 2.5 Gb package is still pretty small. For a heavy downloader, 2.5 Gb is a couple of DVDs, so probably these packages are best for very slight home usage but nothing more. They say these packages feature "dedicated" 1 Mbps of bandwidth but I am suspecting this is a marketing trick. Unless they provide SLA and state that 1 Mbps as CIR and provide a clear refunding policy if they fail to meet the 1 Mbps line, these "dedicated" statements have very little weight. I also haven't saw any mentioned about the SLA on their website.

Premium and Dedicated packages. This is a priority-based model much like a Teles SkyDSL service. Basically, you have to pay to get good speeds here. This model works too, however the more users are signing up the more the speeds tend to get really poor on the standard default priority setting, so the provider urges you to pay more to have the broadband experience you really expect from a satellite service. This is what happens with most of priority-based ISPs today and I do not think this one is exception. I really doubt that a so called $95 4 Mbps package will provide 4 Mbps or even 500 Kbit/s all the time. It includes a so-called Priority 2 mode where you have 2 Gb of prioritized traffic. When you exhaust this quota, you're back to default priority.  That's where you should expect really a much slower performance. The business model is designed the way to have users paying for premium prioritized speeds. Anything that is considered on a default priority is just a bonus in this case.

Let me give an example:

https://twi.skydsl.de/skymon.php?issuer=100&speed=low&prio=1&fvtype=1&fvart=70&s
ize=big&satellite=EUROBIRD3D&period=24h

This is the chart from the Sateline site. You can see the speed during the daytime on a default priority is something around 100 kbit/s. During nights when all users are asleep the package provides pretty decent speeds, until users wake up and start to pay for their prioritized downloads.

Other charts on their website advertise flatline dedicated-like experience, however that's only until you exhausted your traffic quota I believe.

The SkyFIP/RFD services are offline services similar to EOL DD, so I won't review them.

PS: I just realized the bandwidth charts on Sateline website point to Skydsl.de, so this is really a Teles SkyDSLservice resold under a different name.

The word "unlimited", when applied to what is a actually a shared service, is seriously misleading for the majority of non-technical visitors to this website who are simply seeking a reasonably priced internet access service.  What they need, per end user PC,  is an average of about 10 - 30 kbit/s download and 2 - 6 kbit/s upload, with short term download bit rates of several hundred kbit/s.  For this a price of around $70 - $210 per month would apply, using $700 per month per 100kbit/s as the baseline for a dedicated service.

For this reason the word "unlimited" must be used only in connection with dedicated SCPC type services. The price will approximate to $700 per month per 100kbit/s which is what it costs to provide, assuming QPSK and small dish reception.  Otherwise, it is unaccepable marketing spam.

If you have a shared service it is not unlimited. It is limited by the fact that you are having to share it with others.  Please be very careful with your messages and edit earlier messages where your text is liable to be misunderstood.

I don't intend to delete this thread, as I hope it is usefully informative to the uninitiated.

Best regards, Eric.