Thank you everybody, now I know..

I believe that's what's most likely in the UK.

I believe you are incorrect. The satellite services in the news are all two way ( HYLAS from Avanti, Tooway from Eutelsat etc).

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

I believe that's what's most likely in the UK.

I believe you are incorrect. The satellite services in the news are all two way ( HYLAS from Avanti, Tooway from Eutelsat etc).

Hmmm. Well in that case latency is going to be double my original comment.

http://www.tooway.com/tooway-faq.html#q12

£29.99 a month for 2Mbps, and apparently buys you 1.2GB of data, with speeds slowing down beyond that.
£100 gets you 6GB at the highest priorty.

So hardly meeting the requirements of affordable access to services like iPlayer. If no other solution it would be useful, or for people who travel and set-up for a number of days in different locations.

If subsidies are available to cover setup fees they may stand a chance, but its deja-vu as back in 2002/2003 we had a rash of satellite propositions.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

http://www.tooway.com/tooway-faq.html#q12

£29.99 a month for 2Mbps, and apparently buys you 1.2GB of data, with speeds slowing down beyond that.
£100 gets you 6GB at the highest priorty.

So hardly meeting the requirements of affordable access to services like iPlayer. If no other solution it would be useful, or for people who travel and set-up for a number of days in different locations.

If subsidies are available to cover setup fees they may stand a chance, but its deja-vu as back in 2002/2003 we had a rash of satellite propositions.

Yeah, the Tooway specs don't sound all that fantastic for speeds.

http://www.tooway.com/tooway-packages.html

So basically it's meeting Lord Carter's proposed USO albeit with a half second latency and horrible usage restrictions.

Not really surprising I suppose. Satellite is heavily contended in the 'local loop' (can't really call it the last mile, lol) so speed and usage are going to be restricted accordingly. All in all it sounds like a good solution if you're stuck half way up a mountain or in the wildnerness but in the UK at least you'd have to be pretty unfortunate to need to rely on satellite and pretty desperate to want to pay those kind of prices.

But it would allow virtually everyone to have access who does not now - ie. satisifies political statements.
Virtually as satellite's can be blocked by mountains, gorges

For a farm miles from any other property it may make sense, but those small villages of 200 homes suffering due to line length to an already enabled exchange are a different matter.

It has been mentioned that I-Player from BBC could be watched via satellite broadband. This is not the case, as your IP add will be based in Italy or Luxembourg and Iplayer is only available in the UK!!
Rubbish!!

I fiind satellite broadband very good for online gaming ,I play World of war craft and Lord of the rings online also use voice for in game play no problem.I would say it is expensive £26.00 a month this allows me 25 mb a month and a good speed for all I need.I live remote so land based broadband not an option at moment.
I also found out you can play online games very well on dial up speed,but you will not update easily, that does require a good speed,but not imposible.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

I fiind satellite broadband very good for online gaming

Really? Don't you find the long ping times off-putting?
Many people on these forums whine when their pings (to the game servers) go above something like 30ms, so I can't imagine how many complaints there'd be when the return path (from www to the satellite subscriber) takes at least 240ms (approximately the time taken for a round trip of 44,000 miles - about that from the satellite base station, up to the satellite, then back down to Earth).
And this 240ms doesn't include time to get from the user, over a dial-up modem, out to the internet, to the game server, then back from the game server to the satellite base station.

I'm amazed on-line gaming is possible with such high pings (like I said; given how much people complain when their normal pings go up by a few tens of ms).