I've just got satellite broadband and i'd like to share a bit about it with you.
My adsl round here in rural Lincolnshire, UK is very poor, 2mb on a good day. Due to the small number of lines our exchange serves, this would never be upgraded to faster Internet.
So I looked in to satellite broadband, specifically Tooway. Tooway is a service that serves Europe from the KA-SAT satellite launched in 2011. I've had it for about a week and i'm very impressed. I chose to self-install and it was very straight forward. If you're handy with the spanners i'd recommend doing this as it will save you £100-£150. Your chosen supplier will provide everything you need to install the system, dish, wall bracket, coax cable, cable clips and the modem. I used the KA-Sat finder iphone app to roughly locate the satellite and choose the location of the dish. (I chose to go with Bentley Walker).
A quick call to your supplier activates the system and you're good to go. That's it. I'm on the unlimited package which offers download speed of 20mb and upload of 6mb. The real speeds I get are between 20-22mb download and about 5.5mb upload.
Before ordering, I read the horror stories about it taking an age to display a page bit it's really not that noticeable. There is a slight delay as you'd expect but nothing to complain about. The incredible download speed more than makes up for that. You get a UK IP address so there are no issues with using iplayer or Sky On Demand services.
If you're thinking about wanting fast Internet but like me, you know this will never happen by traditional means, I definately recommend Tooway as an alternative. Of course the only downside is the latency which makes online gaming unsuitable. It's about 750-800ms. VOIP and FaceTime and the like function well, with only a small delay at the other end.
My adsl round here in rural Lincolnshire, UK is very poor, 2mb on a good day. Due to the small number of lines our exchange serves, this would never be upgraded to faster Internet.
So I looked in to satellite broadband, specifically Tooway. Tooway is a service that serves Europe from the KA-SAT satellite launched in 2011. I've had it for about a week and i'm very impressed. I chose to self-install and it was very straight forward. If you're handy with the spanners i'd recommend doing this as it will save you £100-£150. Your chosen supplier will provide everything you need to install the system, dish, wall bracket, coax cable, cable clips and the modem. I used the KA-Sat finder iphone app to roughly locate the satellite and choose the location of the dish. (I chose to go with Bentley Walker).
A quick call to your supplier activates the system and you're good to go. That's it. I'm on the unlimited package which offers download speed of 20mb and upload of 6mb. The real speeds I get are between 20-22mb download and about 5.5mb upload.
Before ordering, I read the horror stories about it taking an age to display a page bit it's really not that noticeable. There is a slight delay as you'd expect but nothing to complain about. The incredible download speed more than makes up for that. You get a UK IP address so there are no issues with using iplayer or Sky On Demand services.
If you're thinking about wanting fast Internet but like me, you know this will never happen by traditional means, I definately recommend Tooway as an alternative. Of course the only downside is the latency which makes online gaming unsuitable. It's about 750-800ms. VOIP and FaceTime and the like function well, with only a small delay at the other end.