A Fresh Look At Avonline

I have satisfied all conditions imposed by / suggested by Avonline.  I am within my allowance, havent downloaded 20% of monthly allowance in any one week during peak hours, I am standing on one leg and playing the bagpipes ..... but the speed is still dire, unable to stream, pages take an age to load etc

Net result - I cannot continue with Avonline and certainly would advise others not to sign up for it.

In the words of D-Rream 'Thing's can only get better worse'

I think the fundamental problem is sales people using the expression "up to 20 Mbit/s" for service that actually comprises download carriers, each of 68 Mbit/s, with each shared by hundreds of customers.

No one seems to have developed a technical way of fair sharing this capacity according to amount paid per month and simultaneously finding a satisfactory way of explaining this that is both honest (for the customer) and tempting (for the salesman).

Selling "up to 20 Mit/s" sounds brilliant till you realise the average bit rate will not exceed 66 kbit/s for a 20 GB per 4 weeks service.

Maybe they should say that the instantaneous download bit rate is 68 Mbit/s (clear sky) but that bit rate limiters apply such that progressively lower bit rate limits apply per second, per 10 sec, per minute, per 10 minutes, per hour, per four hours, per day, per week, per 4 weeks.

Avonline, and many other companies, are only intermediary resellers of the Tooway service, which is operated and managed by Skylogic in Italy. I guess that all the resellers have the same difficulty getting information out of Skylogic. Don't be too hard on the reseller technical staff. Help them by providing plenty of information so they have evidence to support their efforts in dealing with Skylogic.

There is an old thread in this satsig forum about Tooway service that makes interesting historic reading. Read many pages at
https://www.satsig.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1217159872
I see that I locked that thread and stopped more additional comments, after it got rather long !

@ roger, I too am with avonline, and experiencing what you are!

Well surprise, surprise Avonline called me today saying it was in response to my emails. They said their supplier (Tooway/Skylogic) are implementing a FAP and moving heavy users onto another channel so within 1 or 2 weeks 'ordinary' users should see their download performance return to the advertised levels. I do not know if that is all true but I will watch with interest.