Tooway 10mb+ Misleading?

Hi All

I have lived with this service since last September, and despite being 'better than nothing' I would hope so for £100 pcm...

My real issue is that the product is advertised as a 10mb service, but it's in fact only that fast when you are actually downloading files. What they don't tell you is that day to day real life web surfing is little better than dial-up. It's woeful. Should they not be telling us this at point of purchase? If I want to download a film, (which I may do once a month otherwise I'd get penalised for excess data usage!) then great, but that's not what I need the web for.

I'd be interested to know your opinions - as Tooway themselves seen impossible to contact, and my ISP are less than forthcoming. I also had serious loss of service initially thanks to spot Beam 23 not working properly (anyone else?) and never got anywhere there either!


Many thanks

Web surfing invariable uses lots of small requests, which means the latency aspect does not help e.g. a BBC News page gets content from something like 8 different servers.

You may find that the caching options in different webbrowsers may make the experience a little better. With the rise of Ajax i.e. interactivity on pages things are getting worse too.

Though if using Google Chrome, watch out for the pre-fetch system eating into your usage allowance.

What would be a cool thing to do is, record a video of going to a slow website, after having cleared all your browser caches, and compare that with some one on a slower ADSL service doing exactly the same.

Thanks for that, interesting stuff. I use Safari on a Mac generally. So do you mean clearing the cache would result in the web pages downloading slower? That seems to be the case - 10 seconds or more to load bbc.co.uk!

Yeap exactly.

Not sure what caching options Safari gives you in terms of making it better.

On Chrome which had not seen news.bbc.co.uk before and a 5Meg ADSL2+ connection it was 3 to 4 seconds to have last element drawn.

Not sure what accelerator software is available for OSX, but some dial-up accelerators can help with satellite services.

I'm guessing you tried all other options of getting a fast service?

3G, Mobile broadband
Fixed Wireless
Bonded DSL
BET (Broadband Enabling Technology) - not sure if BT ever made this available to customers/re-sellers.

Satellite is just terrible. Although they have been able to increase the speed noting can be done about the latency, cost and associated usage limits.

it depends what you call misleading. After all, you wouldn't have been installed without accepting the incredible restrictive FAP. you were probably enticed by their £1 install offer, but when you look at it... i would choose the ones that cost £500 for the install with no FAP control like tooway.

In reply to a post by 5km:

I'm guessing you tried all other options of getting a fast service?

3G, Mobile broadband
Fixed Wireless
Bonded DSL
BET (Broadband Enabling Technology) - not sure if BT ever made this available to customers/re-sellers.

Satellite is just terrible. Although they have been able to increase the speed noting can be done about the latency, cost and associated usage limits.

Thank you

Mobile broadband is not an option, no signal. We looked at a community program like Rutland but that wasn't going to be cost effective - fixed wireless, yup looked into this too. Bonded DSL I'd never heard of, thanks, but seems considerably more expensive even than my £100 per month for satellite...

Seems that if you live in the countryside - you're of insignificance!

In reply to a post by trumpet272:

Seems that if you live in the countryside - you're of insignificance!

You just have to hope that someday FTTP will come your way.