i have download speed on my ‘broadband’ of less than 1 Mbps. it’s intolerable, tho i have been tolerating for a while. My provider (orange, i’m in france) said basically ‘if you don’t like it you can lump it’ when we called them about it.
slowness seemingly caused by the local telephone cables being at maximum capacity, if that makes sense. as soon as people get home from work it’s pretty much unusable.

satelite, after and install cost to get the kit, would cost only a fiver a month more a month,for a download speed of 22 or 30 Mbps, though a volume limit of 10/15 GB per month.

Questions:
is it reliable?
do you get quoted speeds?
are reliabilty/speed affected by things like weather? no idea what length of waves this type of satelite uses. are theyvulnerable to interferance?

i can borrow a beeper tool to set the dish, can do the install myself no bother etc, so am seriously considering it

Not used one per-se. What are you doing online, 15gb a month sounds a lot but if you stream media it`ll get eaten up in a matter of days. Also consider upload speeds, new ka-band satellite will give you decent upload. The older style will be poor, very poor.

15gb a month sounds a lot

Err – I sometimes use that on my mobile… 😳

Thank goodness I have 1TB a month at home.

I’ve a friend in Spain with satellite broadband. It seems pretty good. NOT good for things where you need low latency, like Skype or gaming.

Rachel

My brother has a place in Sardinia with Sat broadband.
The speed is fine apparently but he only has a 40Gb/month allowance so that would be worth checking

Hmm

In my experience it is pretty slow , the average ping is 600ms and then it is massively affected by the weather and very expensive too. I would only consider it if I was massively desperate

Hockropper +1

so ping is the time for a singal to go out and come back is it?
is that the same as latency?
i should educate myself by reading up on wikipedia, but i’m lazy and i’ve been installing linux for the past week…

A friend has it at his place in the middle of nowhere in the south of france. Seems to work pretty well. Certainly no issues when we stay there. He’s pretty tech savvy so I’m sure its the best option there.

My brother and his family use it where they are in Hampshire. By all accounts it’s very slow and expensive to the point where downloading or streaming is a waste of time. If I remember correctly, they got an Xbox last christmas, plugged it in and then waited eight hours for the out of the box updates which would usually take 10-15 minutes!
Not sure if it’s of any use for you, but they now use a 4g dongle / tablets with data contracts rather than wifi. There are limitations but I understand that it has worked out as a better solution.

We looked at it (as well as Air-Band which is microwave so far lower latency but has all sorts of different issues). It just wasn’t going to be worth it for any performance increase. We ended up installing two ADSL lines and bonding them through a third party company. THere’s still a cap (250gb which we almost always breach with 4 of us) but the performance is just about okay.

I used to install VSAT back in the day when there were no decent international circuits to places where the company had offices. I remember thinking then surely this is just a stopgap!

Fibre for us next year. It’ll be like coming out of the dark ages 😉

My old work used to have Satelite internet and I remember it being very slow for general browsing the web (slow ping to blame I guess). It was pretty quick when downloading (once it had “connected” to the destination) but I just found it pretty crap. And as mentioned above, heavy rain used to render it useless at times.

This was quite a few years ago now so it might be lots better now.

I’m guessing mobile broadband is not an option?

We had it back in the day before Dumfries and Galloway got high speed broadband. It was a definite step up from dual ISDN lines. It felt slow though due to the latency. Couldn’t game on it and using Skype was comical. It was fine for downloading though as the latency didn’t effect that as it’s only 1 request per file, rather than hundreds per page.

A 15gb limit doesnt seem very high though. In a house of 4 we use about 3-400gb a month….

I have it. It fluctuates between 5mbps to about 25-30mbps with the little router mounted antenna. Safe to assume it’d be stronger and more consistent if I had an external one. It’s still fast and stable enough to watch Netflix and Youtube with out any real problems. 180gig a month allowance.

I’ve installed it a couple of times for events and stuff.

22-23Mbps is the theoretical max, but you get pretty close to it.

It’s very laggy, whilst 20Mbps is pretty decent, the slow ping makes browsing seem slow.

Weather can have a serious effect on it, wind makes the dish wobble but permanent insulations are probably better at that.

4G not an option? I think it would be cheaper, faster and more reliable.

Sorry, I’ve got 4g not satellite. Assumed it was the same thing. Disregard my post.

We looked at mast to satellite, we would of went for it but our line of sight could be compromised by the neighbours trees if they grow much taller.

Satellite to satellite looks to be pretty ropey from what I found.

I use it, but only because it’s all we can get here. As others have said, download speed is not too bad – but the lag makes anything interactive glacialy slow. Also, download limits are really tight. I pay £45 per month for 30gb, and can struggle to stay within that (especially when I inadvertently allow a Windows update, grrr.) There’s a community radio broadband busy setting up here. When the Newtown reaches us, the satellite dish is coming down!

If its slowing down during popular times, thats almost certainly the contention ratio. Are French exchanges available for Communication Providers to install their own equipment? (Unbundling) If so, switching provider (especially to a more expensive one) may result in a consistent speed even during busy times.

The only other thing it could be would be REIN interference from appliances in your house or neighbours along the route. Could be family or neighbours turning something on when they are home.

I’ve not had broadband for months. It depends what you’re doing online, but I found out my phone contract was unlimited data. I ditched the broadband and now tether my laptop to my phone. All for less than a tenner a month. Don’t notice much difference between supper-fast broadband and tethered 3G for everyday browsing. Even Youtube works fine.

I don’t download films anymore 🙂