SatSig topic:

Tooway unusable in the evening

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Jan 2^nd, 2014 at 10:50am

I have been having a few problems using Tooway in the evening with speeds as low as 64kbits/s. Through the day it works fine but degrades as the day goes on.

My provider says my dish is out of alignment and that is causing the issues:-

Quote:

The network shows that your dish is sitting as follows ,

SNR Return 9.26db

SNR Forward 11.8 db

Both upload and download must be above 10db , if not speeds will vary dramatically.

So my question is, is this a viable reason for my poor signals in the late afternoon and evening? Why is it perfect in the morning and degrades through the day?

Thanks
Chris

Jan 2^nd, 2014 at 4:43pm

1. Dish mis-pointing is one possibility. The satellite moves slightly in a tiny daily pattern: circle, ellipse, figure of eight or similar. Your dish pointing should ideally be towards the centre of the long term average satellite position. See below:

With a serious dish pointing error, as shown in the figure, during part of the day the performance will be poor, particularly at the higher 30 GHz frequency where the beam-width is narrower. Only when the satellite is to the bottom right (part of the day) will the performance will be excellent. The situation a month later may be quite different with the satellite moving around elsewhere within its station-keeping box. It slowly drifts east or west according to occasional thruster firings. The north-south shape gradually increases in magnitude (0.8 deg per annum) and requires more frequent thruster firings to keep it within +/- 0.1 or +/- 0.15 deg inclination.

2. An alternative explanation is dew/moisture/water-film/water-drops on the feed or dish which appear in the cooler evening/night time.
Do things improve if you dry the feed window and dish ?

3. A further, and quite likely explanation is that your are being deliberately throttled during times when the satellite is congested by the traffic demands from many other active users. If you are a generally heavy user you are likely to be affected when light users become active and they need to be given a chance.

Download and keep a copy of this document:
https://www.accesointernetsatelital.com/Data_speed_congestions.pdf

The fundamental problem is that each beam only has up to 400 Mbit/s capacity and, with several thousand (possibly rising eventually to 12000 ?) sites per beam, congestion is inevitable when everyone has unduly high expectations of both bit rate (<20 Mbit/s)and Gbytes downloaded.

Jan 2^nd, 2014 at 6:45pm

I have just run another speed test and it won't even complete the test, seems frozen on 0.26mb/s

I checked the modem and the figures appear fine to me, what do you think?

I am told it's the dish and I am not being throttled, I find it increasingly hard to believe.

Chris

Jan 2^nd, 2014 at 8:42pm

Quote:

[quote]
So my question is, is this a viable reason for my poor signals in the late afternoon and evening?

No, it's not.
Your signal levels are OK and your provider is fobbing you off ... the Forward threshold is 10.0 dB but the Return threshold is 8.5dB and your signals are above those thresholds. It's wrong of them to suggest that your dish pointing is the reason for poor performance in the evening.

It's the satellite operator, Skylogic, who apply the throttling and your provider probably has no say in this ... but they should be honest with you.

Jan 3^rd, 2014 at 7:20am

Thanks, that is interesting and pretty much as I thought. Can anyone explain what all this means?

image was here: https://aplaceinthecountry.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/untitled.jpg

Thanks
Chris

Jan 3^rd, 2014 at 1:45pm

The return link SNR refers to the received quality of your transmitted bursts which will have been received and measured at the teleport hub gateway. Such measurement results are then presumably sent to the "Check Portal" web server.

Your uplink beam-width (at 30 GHz) is narrower than your receive beam, so dish pointing is critical to get a good uplink result from your site.

I have no idea how to interpret the "Accounted Volume and Max Speed Status". Incidentally, they should be using a lower case k, not K.

I have moved your image to the satsig server and reduced the image file size from 96k to 29k bytes, by reducing the quality.

Jan 3^rd, 2014 at 4:41pm

The "Max Speed status" shows what speed you are supposed to be getting with your contract...20K download and 6K upload.

The rectangular bar below indicated how much of your monthly allowance you have used to date. When the window fill with blue, you have used all of your allowance for the month and will get throttled back.

Jan 3^rd, 2014 at 11:12pm

Quote:

The return link SNR refers to the received quality of your transmitted bursts which will have been received and measured at the teleport hub gateway. Such measurement results are then presumably sent to the "Check Portal" web server.

Your uplink beam-width (at 30 GHz) is narrower than your receive beam, so dish pointing is critical to get a good uplink result from your site.

That's interesting, but what's puzzling me now is that my forward SNR is much lower than my return SNR. Right now https://checkportal.skylogicnet.com/ is saying

Forward SNR 8.6 dB
Return SNR 11.08 dB

I don't understand how that can make sense ... I mean, how can the fragile uplink be getting 11.08 while the presumably more robust downlink is only getting 8.6? I'm near the Northern edge of beam 19 (green, central Italy), and the weather here is fairly rainy.

Jan 4^th, 2014 at 10:42am

Forward SNR 8.6 dB
Return SNR 11.08 dB

Maybe they have reduced the power of your forward carrier from the teleport hub gateway or it is raining at the teleport hub gateway, affecting their uplink more than they can cope with using uplink power control.

There is also the possibility that your modem/TRIA has switched to receiving a lower power carrier in the adjacent beam.

I am interested to know what the forward carrier spectrum looks like. Can anyone record it using spectrum analyser?. The bandwidth is understood to be 250 MHz per beam. I think the spectrum may comprise up to 6 carriers each about 34 MHz wide (40 MHz spacing). If all these carriers come via one transmit amplifier at the gateway site and one transmit amplifier on the satellite then there is power sharing and intermodulation problem. If they increase the number of carriers the power level per carrier could well come down.

Jan 4^th, 2014 at 11:21am

Finally got to the bottom of it and it is quite astonishing how shitty this throttling by Tooway is. I am being throttled in peak hours because I download too much data in the free "unlimited period" if you use more than 1GB of data a night in the "unlimited" period between 11pm and 7am you are abusing the system. I find this incredible!

I am being told that I need to download during peak hours and stay within my 50GB and I will be fine and speeds will be fine too. In other words this free "unlimited" during the night data is a complete lie as it will affect your download speeds at other times.

Can't wait to dump this awful service when my village eventually gets it's wireless service up and running.

Cheers
Chris

Jan 4^th, 2014 at 6:10pm

At least you got some definite information out of them, congratulations.

I think there are 2 questions here worth considering separately:

(1) how good or bad of a job are the service providers doing at explaining their traffic allocation policies;

(2) how fair or reasonable are the traffic allocation policies that they are experimenting with.