[Closed] Satellite Broadband

Used to have it back in the day before BT sorted their shit out and got some new lines to our family farm. It was great for somethings, not great at others. So long as you're aware of the latency issues I think it's a solid choice.

A customer of mine had sat broadband installed about 15 years ago as the alternative was dialup. When it worked it was ok, but was about as reliable as an old reliant robin. As soon as it rained, snowed or a bird landed on the dish, the speed dropped to a snails pace or the connection dropped completely.

Things may be better nowadays, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same issues still exist.

As an aside, their neighbour was a scaffolding company called Dick's Erections which always used to make me chuckle! Yes, I have been drinking this evening, but true story!

Regularly had as lottle as 0.8mps from my BT. IME (on boats) satelite is slow and very expensive, ok for text emails or basic simple file download - oir main use was that email and weather data files

Crap, absolute crap from my experience.

1.7 MB/s tonight.

Good look getting that reliably from satellite.

1.7 is great for ours. It's currently on and off 0.6 due to a line fault. Bloomin countryside. And we are about 5 miles from the exchange.

OP is that bits (b) or bytes (B)? The B version would not be too shonky as rural broadband.

OP is that bits (b) or bytes (B)? The B version would not be too shonky as rural broadband.

It's bits- little b.
I'm not really rural though. I'm 10 mins walk from the station of a 10,000 people town in Surrey, admittedly up a residential road that leads to a vast heathland common (Hindhead Common/Devils Punchbowl).
Unfortunatley, instead of coming up the hill from town my telephone cable comes from a fibre enabled cabinet three miles up and across the common, with only a bit of old cast iron drainpipe for protection, often on the surface.
During the day the signal is just about adequate but during the evening it is very , very slow with half a dozen fall outs at least.
There is also a 500 pupil boarding school up the hill between us and the cabinet, so christ knows what will happen when they go back.
I had thought of signing up with another supplier in addition to BT to get more than my fair share of bandwidth. Would that help? WE do have another line into the house, with double sockets, but that is "disconnected" and no other supplier I have spoken to will connect it. It has to be done by BT...

Satellite broadband can be speedy- use it alot working offshore on a v-sat connection, but it's eye-wateringly expensive, 11k € a month for 2 up, 2 down reserved bandwidth on the satellite.

I've used it when staying in remote cottages and it was fine for general internet use, just a hint of latency when loading sites but you get used to the slight pause. It's not like offshore vSAT, which is much more expensive for not much bandwidth. More like a slightly expensive ADSL connection bandwidth-wise. The biggest outlay is for the equipment I imagine.

[i]I had thought of signing up with another supplier in addition to BT to get more than my fair share of bandwidth. Would that help? [/i]

Since it'll be using the same infrastructure, what do you think? 😉