We have been called to see if we can do anything for someone who has satellite broadband as its to quote them, worse than useless.
There're looking at a two hop radio link to some premises they own a couple of miles away, should work well:)
Well that is simply not true, if whatever protocol you run on top needs frequent ACKS to maintain a fast stream
TCP/IP may well be able to cope but many UDP based services will slow down massively.
leave
On the units based tariff? Home::1 is £25/month flat rate for 100 GB download, use it anytime. Top up within a month £10/50 GB or in advance £10/100GB.
I like to know that when I call for help I'm going to talk to some one who understands the whole system and not start with "reboot windows", if I'm calling for help I'll be 99.999% certain that the fault is not in anything under my control.
3 working days is pretty good for a residential line on Standard Care. Now report the same fault after 1800 on the Friday of a bank holiday weekend. The three working days doesn't start until Tuesday morning, so you should have it repaired by the end of Thursday.Only 6 days without internet? I'd be hung drawn a quartered! Total Care, £4/month extra, faults repaired within 24 hours (daytime but once they've started they'll finish), 365 days of the year, inc Christmas Day etc. Last fault we had an "out of area" engineer was sent, he couldn't find/fix the loose jelly bean in a joint post a mile away even though I told him where the JP was. So he handed the fault back, Openreach then pulled an engineer, who knows the area, off a Job in Stockton (40 odd miles away) to come and fix it, which he did in about 10 mins, including checking the location of the fault with his TDR.
The local ISP has played with satellite for a couple of the remoter places but that was a while ago and used the phone line on dialup for the uplink. It worked, after a fashion...
The more modern systems with up and down via satellite ought to be some what better. But you can't escape the huge latency.
Terrestial with recent kit up on 5 GHz really should knock the socks off satellite. Not only much cheaper, just capital and bit of power, no rental, no puny data cap, no asymetric speed, mS latentcy, etc.
"speed of the link" not what a higher layer is doing over that link.
Do you have line-of-sight to anywhere that does have cable, with whom you might be able to make a deal? Then do a fixed link (either wifi or microwave). That would seem much better than satellite.
I have no idea how good the WightFibre packages are though - using your phone line might work out just as good.
Theo
Hi, the problems are getting through to report problems via their call system. Mick.
Actually more.
Our current usage is in the order of 400 - 500 GB month (4-5 person household - 3-5 including 2 teenagers around a lot of the day - the kids don't go to school , lots of netflix/iplayer/spotify/you tube/gaming/skyping etc.)
ok a chunk of that is uploads (remote online backups probably the largest single proportion of that) which don't count - but that is probably less than 100GB month.
So we would realistically be looking at least at Home::1 300GB - £45 + £15 for FTTC 80/20 as we have now - so- £60 month at least.
The units based tariff would I'm sure be more, since a lot of our use is in the daytime.
It's this sorts of useage which tends to make small isps expensive for us
Sure, but in 10 years in this house I've phoned my isp's support line once, some years ago. But paying £60 instead of £20 to get that better support that I probably will never use doesn't seem worth it for us.
We'd survive, though youngest would grumble the most :-) Though in case the broadband was unaffected. If we get desperate we can go round the corner to the library and use a computer or their wifi, or over the road to the pub for wifi.
Sure, I can see for some people that's worthwhile, and I can see that where you live, a fault on your line is a more likely eventuality than for us.
But we live in the middle of our village - probably less than 100m line length to our cabinet. In the 10 years this is the first time I've had to report a line fault (I think there have been a couple of times that the broadband has gone down for a short time -a couple of hours at most maybe - presumably when they were doing some work or other. We've never lost it for any significant amount of time)
For us, paying almost £48/year against an not very common, non critical eventuality doesn't seem good value, YMMV :-)
Grandchild has mobile based broadband. £10 per month unlimited with tethering permitted. A one year deal. Don't know which provider.
Most domestic BB offerings use some variant of xDSL to carry the last leg of the signal to your home. Hence they depend on having a phone line. If you want a option that doesn't then you need either Fibre to the Premiss (not available in most places, and expect to pay several hundred a month), access to the Virgin cable network, or some other more business oriented service like Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) etc.
The line will usually be provided by BT openreach regardless of which ISP you use. You don't have to use BT as an ISP.
Do your own survey...
You can use JavaJive's alignment calculator :
I was not aware the sky offered a broadband via satellite option. TalkTalk I would not dream of using for a domestic install. Virgin's only real selling point is if you are able to get their cable service.
Plusnet are one of the better options if you have to ring them IME. They speak English for starters!
If you want faster response, sign up initially as a business customer.
The main issues with sat BB are partly cost and partly technical.
The long latency means real time applications are out (VOiP, skype, gaming etc).
Secondly with the providers I looked at, they charge a fair bit for
6GB/month of traffic, and loads more for 20GB/Month, and quite often that is the "top" package - you may not be able to have more than that. Since I often use 6GB in a day, it made sat services non starters, unless you are prepared to spend lots of time load balancing and prioritising service to stick non critical comms over an alternative bearer.
It exists, and you can also get two way comms. In the past that was with a modem and phone line providing the uplink, but more recent kit will do bi-directional comms over air as well.
For example, see:
Plenty of providers can bundle phone and BB together, which makes is a little bit cheaper.
+1
I used to connect to computers at a company which had satellite. A really horrible experience. They have since been able to switch to a pretty ordinary package - at best Infinity - and even with them using far, far more bandwidth themselves, the experience of connection is a delight.
Whose system Mick VM's or Bt's?.
Yes Zen are very good at that:)
Worth a try they have an excellent backup service based in that furrign land Lancashire;!. They do domestic landline rental at a less than the cost from BT and you can keep your number, have a look see .
We have several services with them
We put in a six mile one a few months ago, just did a quick test it was a fibre feed at the other end, 65 down and 15 up:)
All that the same for me (but AAISP).
The UDP service itself will not slow down - its unidirectional and does not require back channel comms to function (its connectionless and you can use it on a simplex link).
However what happens after than is application dependent. If the application imposes some form or ARQ protocol on top or UDP, and worse, does so without a sliding window, then yes that would get slower. Also applications that use UDP but require bi-directional sequenced messages (e.g. DHCP, DNS, etc) will see the latency stretch out the exchange of messages dramatically.
(however there are ways of using specially designed proxy servers to mitigate some of these issues with links with long turnarounds - I developed some of them for Marconi some years ago for routing internet traffic over half duplex HF Radio links, where link latencies could be in the order of 20 seconds or more)
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