SatSig topic:

Service drops to zero every day

(Read 14630 times)

Jul 3^rd, 2013 at 6:30pm

I switched to Satellite Broadband provided by Avonline as 20mb speeds were quite appealing after receiving speeds of 1mb and below from Orange.

Initially no real probe, speed tests suggest I wasnt getting close to 20mb very often but it worked.

For past three weeks, the service takes a dive in the evening, I thought this started about 7pm but having tried it earlier, its more like 5pm and today about 4pm. Speedtests provided by Avonline suggest I am getting 20mb and 5mb upload but all other tests suggest between 1 and 2mb download and ?? upload.

Often their own speedtest stalls on the upload all together or eventually returns a result of 0.1mb or similar

As a family, we come home from work and school and want to watch things online at a time to suit us as terrestrial tv is a bit dire. The service is unavailable at this key time and remains down until 1 or 2 am.

After calling several times a day and following all advice, done tests, waited etc .... three weeks later I still have no improvement and I am paying £65 per month for ???

The technical line is usually answered by Adam or Stewart and the requests are usually 'do a speedtest' and we will monitor it overnight .... last weekend the reason given was maintenance on the satellite and it should all be ok now - it wasn't. Today after three calls, and Adam taking 5 mins out to speak to someone else, the reason given is ....... it's high volume users spoiling it for the rest of you good guys.

This doesnt wash. The problem would affect everyone using Satellite Broadband, My area, UK, Europe. It would be all over the internet, their phone lines would be jammed, there would be some urgency and pressure to sort it out, there would be an immediate answer on the phone instead of 'mmm thats unusual'

Its implied that everyone is affected, I dont think thats the case at all.

I have been fed a load of bull.

So can I reach out to the wider world and ask for other peoples experiences please, if there are other forums or avenues to follow please advise

Jul 3^rd, 2013 at 7:51pm

Hi there

Have you seen my thread on this very forum about the exact same issues? Ive been speaking to Stuart at Avonline as well and have been given the same reasons. The issue was explained to me that another provider in Europe is allowing their users to download terabytes of data without any capping or fair use. This is happening every evening for me too...

Avonline this evening said that Tooway were applying a "fix" to this issue but it would be around 3 days.

Ive been an Avonline customer for two weeks. The first couple of days AND evenings appeared fine but then it all went wrong for me... Avonline sent out a replacement moded but that didnt help. That when they discovered it was a wider issue affecting many (probably thousands) of tooway customers.

Im on the same package as you and have chewed up 70gb of data since installation on June 13th. I know this is alot of data but that approx 100gb a month and this is what I told Avonline Sales I would be downloading before ordering so there are absolutely no surprises. Sales team did say that 100gb would not put my on the high user grid and I can see now that because they have mentioned the users that are downloading terabytes of data...

I do have confidence that Avonline/Tooway will resolve this. Stuart is VERY helpful and we have to give them (tooway) a chance to get this fixed even though im paying for a service that is currently sub par.

Jul 3^rd, 2013 at 7:52pm

Adding to this....

Avonline CAN see the results of the speed tests you/we perform so its worth doing one every hour during the affected times so that they can see you are not moaning for the fun of it...

Jul 3^rd, 2013 at 9:45pm

Have read the happy customer post yes?

I have had three weeks of doing speed tests, nothing changed at all. Doing a few tests ok but every day is just to keep the idiot customer (me) away for another 24 hours.

Seriously, if this was such a widespread problem 'we' would know about it. It's as if the service is throttled as customers who exceed their gb allowance are throttled. I am on unlimited just watch stuff and daughter uses YouTube. Nothing stressful

The explanation being high usage people logging on between 5pm and 2am every day is a load of crap. You tell me that Serious downloaders haven't got the technical know how to download shed loads 24 hours a day. I have seen the beam coverage, that means that loads of people are affected daily and how come they're silent?

It doesn't add up.

Skylogic in Turin say no problems and that avonlines explanation is nonsense so ???? Who do I believe, a company taking £65 per month from me and have kept me hanging and blame the satellite or a European company that haven't heard about this problem.

You'd have thought the satellite providers would know something

Jul 3^rd, 2013 at 9:54pm

Yep. Started out as a happy customer. I came from an ADSL connection that was 2mb down and .3 up that was always dropping. Sounds just like my new satellite connection.

The post I was talking about was my speed issues post. Basically, I have exactly the same issues as you. Are you on an orange spot by any chance?

When I spoke to Stuart at Avonline this evening, he said that Tooway knew about the issue and were actively working on a fix. Have you been told something different?

Jul 3^rd, 2013 at 10:40pm

Within each spot beam are several 68 Mbit/s carriers. It is quite feasible that a congestion problem applies to just one carrier in one beam so its congestion would not give rise to Europe wide complaint reports.

That is not say that wide area faults can't occur. If the Berlin gateway teleport hub has a general problem it would affect 10 (out of 82) beams scattered all across Europe. Only people in Berlin or at Tooway HQ in Italy would be able to perceive such a general problem.

It is important therefore that as many customers as possible provide trouble reports; resellers need to feed this back to Tooway and Tooway need to do something about it.

I greatly regret that Tooway do not permit end users to speak with RF and network engineers at the teleport hubs so that troubles can be diagnosed and fixed quickly.

Congestion will easily occur if customers are allowed to download at 20 Mbit/s for more than a few seconds, combined with servers that can feed out data at a similar 20 Mbit/s rate. Just 3 users attempting to do this will almost saturate a 68 Mbit/s carrier. What about the remaining hundreds of other customers ? Hoping they will all be inactive sounds too optimistic to me. Don't forget the "up to" prefix to the 20 Mbit/s.

Best regards, Eric.

Jul 4^th, 2013 at 9:07am

Ohhhh this is very interesting. Only 68 Mbps per spot. Wow is few. How many customers can be in each spot? I need to download about every week a backup to my computer and the backup is about 10 gb. When I download it, always I download a full speed, close to 20 Mbps. I am using 1/3 of the bandwidth in my spot. Ufffff. I will restrict the maximum speed to 5 Mbps the next time, I don't want to disturb another customers.

Jul 4^th, 2013 at 9:33am

I'm in Leicestershire / Derbyshire so prob in same beam?

68mbit for all those people a a small minority can screw it all up? That's a bit of a basic flaw for this day and age

Jul 4^th, 2013 at 12:11pm

I think it is more like:

up to 2 million customers
up to 70 Gbit/s total capacity
82 beams (two with half capacity, and two with a switch such that one or the other is activated)
68 Mbit/s per carrier in clear sky.
up to 10 carriers per beam

so
up to 24,000 customers per beam
up to 2,400 customers per carrier

If anyone has a spectrum analyser in spot 34, eastern UK, I would be interested to hear now many carriers you can see and what bandwidth. A 68 Mbit/s carrier should be about 27.5 MHz wide (assuming 8PSK, 5/6 FEC in clear sky).

It is possible that during the early years of KA-SAT, while the number of customers is lower than the maximum, that the gateway hubs (each hub feeding about 10 beams) will be not be equipped uplink transmit equipment for the full number of carriers.

There should be plenty of capacity if the busy users are carefully allocated to carriers so that congestion is minimised. It is really important that congestion is reported by customers or ideally detected early by the system operators, otherwise service will be disappointing.

Best regards, Eric.

Jul 4^th, 2013 at 12:26pm

Very helpful thank you

Jul 4^th, 2013 at 9:46pm

Ohhh yeah. Very insteresting

Thank you

Jul 4^th, 2013 at 9:57pm

I tried to pop a commercial grade spectrum analyzer on the tria last weekend but it would not power up the tria to get a usable reading.

Jul 4^th, 2013 at 10:29pm

You need a -10 dB coupler tap, or similar, so that the primary coax DC and RF path between the modem and the TRIA is negligibly interrupted. The side path, to the spectrum analyser, should be DC isolated, with a small capacitor or purely inductive coupling, but passing a small sniff of the L band RF present.

Beware letting DC volts anywhere near the input of a professional grade spectrum analyser !

Best regards, Eric

Jul 6^th, 2013 at 8:42am

Yes, odd isn't it that their speed tester is the only one giving the speeds that we are supposed to be getting. I get the same with Tooway speed tester. It says I'm getting 7.5 down and 1.5 up, which is about right but all the other speed testers out there say 3 down and 1 up. I smell a rat!! Undecided

Jul 6^th, 2013 at 8:51am

When I was getting high speeds, a standard download of a reasonably sized file came down fast too with a transfer rate up there with expectations.

Re speed test results. I've been aware for a long time that you can see strange results from the normal flock of speed test sites. I did a speedtest.net test this morning and did see 17 down for a while so they do sometimes work.

Re the resent speed issues we've all been moaning about... Has anyone seen any results to confirm if Tooway has put some measures in place to get us all working again?

Jul 6^th, 2013 at 6:50pm

I have been able to stream past couple of nights. Some buffering and stopping which shouldn't happen at any decent speed but better than past three weeks of zero streaming for me.

Speedprobe tests were giving pretty much 20mb download speeds when other tests gave the more realistic speed result of 'next to nothing'.

If I can't stream and its not working I tend to believe three sites telling me the speed is 1mb or lower than the speedprobe test saying I am getting 20mb and everything is rosy.

Also noticed that I can have a bad test result then while on phone to support and did a test, all of a sudden it rockets to 20mb+ say 37mb at times but averaging a touch lower.

All a bit odd and a bit like blowing smoke up their own arses.

I can get 2.5mb to 3mb with BT .... Or so they say pre sale. But orange speeds were dismal so reluctant to go back to this

Jul 7^th, 2013 at 10:39am

I'm convinced that the Speedprobe tests are 'rigged'.

Jul 7^th, 2013 at 11:00am

I believe you can also test using their FTP server if needed but you have to contact your provider to get the FTP server details.

Using basic FTP will clearly show you the transfer rate.

Jul 7^th, 2013 at 12:21pm

What results do you get with this https://www.satsig.net/speed-test/speed-tester.htm

It simply downloads a 163k bytes html web page file, nothing more. I'm not sure this makes for a representative test to prove or disprove 20 Mbit/s as the test lasts only a fraction of a second and other factors like the propagation latency, my server response time and TCP-IP acknowledgements will dominate the overall experience.

I would have thought that a download lasting 10 seconds or more would be more realistic.

I've put an image https://www.satsig.net/speed-test/mandlebrot-image-49148743-bytes.png
which is 49 Mbytes long and might take 19.6 seconds to download at 20 Mbit/s. It took me 16 minutes to upload it.
How long does it take for you to download ? If you try the download more than once, remember that it may be cached somewhere.

I'll delete the file in a day or two to avoid excess load on my server.

Best regards, Eric.

Jul 7^th, 2013 at 2:42pm

I try it, i tek me about 21.5 sec...
I am using beam 1, in the spain south. Gw5. Berlinl

Jul 7^th, 2013 at 2:45pm

Took me 1 minute 40 seconds to download that image.

A speed test straight afterwards showed a 20.47mb download rate...

Jul 7^th, 2013 at 3:13pm

Took me 59.87secs to download image.

Speedprobe test immediately after showed 6.79Mbps. I'm on Tooway8

Location Valencia, Spain.

Jul 8^th, 2013 at 7:34pm

I did the FTP test with avonline last week. I don't have the results or the details to repeat it any longer but download of 10mb file took about 5 minutes and upload stopped a few times before giving a result in say 10 mins maybe not quite accurate times but it was twice as long at least as download was.

Had ok speeds for two or three days now dismal again.

Jul 16^th, 2013 at 9:29am

Mornin all, just joined the forum after searching for answers as to why my broadband has been slower than BT ADSL for the past couple of weeks. I have just spoken to Avonline, who are not easy to get hold of when there are problems, they tell me Tooway have initiated measures to fix the problem and we should all see improvements in the 'not too distant future'. The guy would elaborate on what that means but said ring back in a week if nothing has improved. Not impressed with that for customer service. This morning my download speed was a measly 1.6Mb/sec. I can pay a fraction of the price and get that from BT !! will monitor with interest.

Jul 17^th, 2013 at 10:09am

Quote:

Mornin all, just joined the forum after searching for answers as to why my broadband has been slower than BT ADSL for the past couple of weeks. I have just spoken to Avonline, who are not easy to get hold of when there are problems, they tell me Tooway have initiated measures to fix the problem and we should all see improvements in the 'not too distant future'. The guy would elaborate on what that means but said ring back in a week if nothing has improved. Not impressed with that for customer service. This morning my download speed was a measly 1.6Mb/sec. I can pay a fraction of the price and get that from BT !! will monitor with interest.

Hi Roger, welcome to the forums. Its probably worth you following the other topic on this matter "Tooway Speed issues" which is far more detailed and updated regularly by many of us who (were) suffering.