SatSig topic:

European Space Agency Broadband Performance study

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May 13^th, 2016 at 2:41pm

The European Space Agency (ESA) has partnered with SamKnows to research the performance of satellite broadband within Europe with the ultimate aim of informing and improving the quality of satellite internet within the Alpine regions of Europe.

If you would like to join the study by hosting a free SamKnows Whitebox please register here -

https://signups.samknows.com/esa/signupform

We give you access to your own data via an online reporting system, and also a monthly email report card to allow you to compare performance and communicate with your ISP.

The unit is plug and play, with the set up simply as per:

MODEM / EXISTING ROUTER > SAMKNOWS UNIT > WIRED DEVICES (if any)

If you have any questions, please contact us on community@samknows.com

Kind regards,

SamKnows

May 13^th, 2016 at 5:52pm

A great idea, well done. I hope many users take up the suggestion.

Several questions..

Pictures: It would be nice to see here a sample user screen shot of the local monitored results and maybe a view of the whitebox rear panel with its ethernet connectors.

Regarding connecting up: Satellite modems (e.g Surfbeam, HughesNet, iDirect) normally have just one ethernet port for the customer and no WiFi antenna. The customer then typically connects an ethernet router/WiFi/4 port switch to give themselves local WiFi access, plus 4 wired devices. Your whitebox box will presumably use one switch port on the ethernet router and all the customers wired devices will be transferred to the whitebox. It would be helpful to show an example documentation drawing of a satellite modem as one of the alternative ways of internet connection. Maybe a greater than character > rather than / in your post above?

Mbytes: Satellite internet users are very sensitive to the cost of the number of Mbytes downloaded per day/month. Higher speeds would be nice but when maybe 600 people are sharing a 20 Mbit/s download there is only going to be so much Mbytes to share out at the monthly prices home users can afford. How much test data is transferred, in the background, up/down per month ? Does the monthly report show the amount ?

You may include images here in satsig forum posts, either as attachments when you write your message (they appear below) or included within the text like so:

Code:

{img}https://www.samknows.com/assets/img/svg/analytics.svg{/img}

Use square brackets to make it work!

Best regards, Eric.

May 29^th, 2016 at 4:49pm

Note,
Quote:

The Whiteboxes download approximately 3GB per month and upload around 1GB if you’re on a sub-50Mbps product. For products faster than 50Mbps the usage volume is higher and varies by product speed. If you’re on a product with a low usage cap then we’d advise against signing up, or at least informing us beforehand so that we can apply a different testing profile.

https://www.samknows.eu/requirements/

May 29^th, 2016 at 6:15pm

A home user with one of the very latest shared satellite internet access services gets 10 GB per month, with a download speed up to 22 Mbit/s, for around 37 euro per month.

Such customers should ask for their testing profile to be set so that their upload and download test traffic is less than say 1% of their monthly allowance, i.e. 80 Mbytes download and 20 Mbytes upload of test traffic per month.

Using 4 GB total for test traffic, out of a total 10GB monthly allowance is too much.