Tooway Satellite or Sharedbond?

Hi

I'm giving up on FTTC, although our exchange (Maidenhead) is enabled, don't think our area is going to be cost effective and there's no sign of it. So I'm looking at 2 options:

1. Sharedband (got 2 lines at the moment ~1mb each) about £280 setup and £120 a year on top of the 2 ADSL subscriptions and extra line rental (about £60 a month for 2mb at best)

2. Tooway Satellite - going with a rental package, about £150 setup then £50 a month. Claimed speeds at 10mb up/2mb down. Will need to keep one ISP going for fixed IP address (needed for business and IP restricted comms I need to make), so total cost on that about £65 a month.

I am swaying towards the Satellite, however I have reservations about non UK IP addresses, port blocking and Latency. The first two I'm waiting on confirmation from the provider (Avonline plc) but the latency concerns me.

So the questions I have:

Latency - 250ms from what i have read... what impact does that have on 1) browsing and 2) large file downloads/movie streaming (LoveFilm/XBox).

Also if anyone has any better solutions, my ears are open. Or any comments on Avonline plc as a provider would be interesting.

Thanks

Tom

Sorry - this was me - did not realise I was not logged in.

Closer to 500ms once the data has gone up to the satellite and come back down.

Thus latency means no to online gaming, some games like poker may be ok, but shooters would be impossible.

Browsing, it will not feel as good as say a 10Meg land based service, since web pages are not one single entity but often many different parts pulled from many different servers, and facebook/twitter et al with all their dynamic updates will perhaps be a pain.

For file downloads, and video streaming it should be OK though. Lovefilm is only a 1 to 1.5Meg stream, XBox I would tend to err towards downloading before playback.

I presume you have exhausted all options to make the 1Meg lines run any faster already?

what IP profiles do the two lines have ? upstream & downstream sync speeds ?

Don't forget though that satellite solutions tend to have lousy download allowances which would get gobbled up pretty quickly with large downloads and/or streaming.

Thanks for the help, to answer:

Line 1:
Upstream: 612
Downstream: 750
Sync speed: 864
BRAS Profile: ADSL750
Interleave: Auto

Still waiting for stats for the second line, only migrated to new ISP this past week, activated today. However it tests here at 1.1mb.

Always found it odd how there is a significant difference between the 2, both lines installed new about 10 months ago, replacement line from the street.

Thanks for the response.

Yea, I'm familiar with the fact a page has many elements that come from all over the place - that's my concern with regards to the latency, that 500ms figure comcerns me even more.

I'm not so bothered about gaming, and anything that's not performance critical but needs fixed IP address, low latency, etc I can route through the Zen ADSL (running a Watchguard XTM). But if everything ends up on this connection I'd rather go down the Sharedband route.

I've just been reading through the guide in your sig. I've got faceplate microfilters with extensions running from those (from the extension punched on the back). I know that the alarm has the ringer connected, and that's on the slower line, so i think i'll try removing that, see if it helps

Cheers

Tom

Yea, the option I've been looking at is 13gb/m, that said I use Zen as an ISP and only get 10gb/m on each line, and I only hit about 50% usage a month. That said, that's mainly due to the fact the performance does not encourage use .

Got the attenuation figures?

If downstream is above 63dB then probably not much can be done, if under that value then you are under performing.

the difference required for one line to sync at 864 and another at just over 1.1 is minimal.

Where do i get the attenuation figures? I can't see them on the Zen portal.

Have the second line information now:

Upstream: 0
Downstream: 1250
Sync Rate: 1440
BRAS Profile: ADSL1250
Interleave: Auto

Thanks

Tom

Generally from the ADSL router you have on the end of the phone line

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.php will help with most hardware in finding the numbers (attenuation, noise margin and sync speeds)

Thought that was going to be the response.

Unfortunately there's no information available, we use Draytek Vigor ethernet modems configured via a Watchguard XTM external interface.

Which Vigor model? They usually show it in the web interface

2 Modems - 110 and 120

They don't have a web interface, they are configured on a firewall and plugged into the ethernet WAN ports.

Just got the attenuation figure from zen for the worst performing connection: 1176, which by my reckoning should allow me a 1mb download rather than 720kbs.

Thanks

Tom

1176 cannot be an attenuation, it will be between 0 and 63.5dB normally. 1176 sounds like a sync speed

http://www.draytek.co.uk/support/kb_vigor100_setup.html

The units do have a web interface, just that the way you usually use them the 192.168.1.1 address may not be visible in your case.

Tom,
If you want any techncal support from the Avonline team, please feel free to contact me directly at [email protected].

We're seeing fantastic performance from our first ToowayBroadband installations.

Mark

If you can get your webmaster to use the right units Mbps rather than 'UP TO 10MB' which is read as 'up to 10MegaBytes' that would be great.

Seems to vary in what units the site uses

13GB for a satellite service is not so bad really. For "normal" usage, it should be fine. Just keep the kids off it if they are gamers - we have had a couple of customers on our (wireless) network with massive usage (one topped 100GB in a month) and in both cases it was kids downloading games (which can be multi-GB these days).

On a different note, I was having a Skype chat with a consulting colleague of mine who lives in darkest Norfolk (I think they still use jungle drums or yoghurt cartons and string to communicate in most of that county!) who has Avonline satellite (the "old" 3.6Mbps service). Have to say I was very impressed with the call quality and it was only around 10 minutes in that I remembered he was on satellite!

Closer to 500ms once the data has gone up to the satellite and come back down.

There are two traversals up to the satellite and down again for any query plus response so the minimum latency has to be 560ms which is imposed by the speed of light (3x10^9 m/s) and the distance to orbit (42.164 km). Add to that terrestrial latencies and turn-around time in the satellite and I think up to 1000ms is not atypical.

As you say interactive games will be impossible. Browsing probably not that pleasant unless you run a local cache and I suspect remote access technologies would be affected as well.

That said people do use satellite services so it has to be more-or-less usable.

Haha, 100GB/month is massive usage Deary me...

Massive might not be the right word, but it is above average for sure

I accept that to serial downloaders, like mr_mojo presumably is, 100GB is a trivial amount of data, but it still represents a massive amount for customers on our network.

Once you get rid of the top 1 or 2 % of users who insist on abusing "unlimited" tariffs, the rest of the customer base will have much more modest demands. Afterall, that is the only way that the "unlimited" tariffs can continue to exist -big ISPs know perfectly well that Mr Average does not really use the broadband that much.

if the average is around 15 GB then 100 GB is definitely at the extreme.

If lines test at 1.1 and 0.7 down then sharedband should give you about 1.6 if the asymmetry is set up and handled correctly. About 0.9M up too.