We are an unlimited customer (ha-ha) and are in fact treated the same as Tooway M, L, XL customers except that the monthly cap is 60GB not the unlimited service that we signed up for.

But yes, the FUP is more a denial-of-any-service-promise policy.

In my ongoing issues logged with Bentley Walker, I asked the following question:

can you tell me what we can expect as the normal speed available during the evening peak - does 4Mbps represent what the purchaser of a £65/month "unlimited 20Mbps" service should expect?

To be met with the not exactly encouraging reply:

The service you are on provides no minimum speed figure. If you would like to move to the IP Connect plan, which has a set upload and download speed, please let me know which speeds you would like.

So in other words there isn't even the promise of the 50:1 contention ratio of bargain-basement consumer broadband.

Clearly they aim sign up as many people as possible, and just aren't concerned about whether the customers end up with a usable Internet service.

Not to mention that the contract terms are a fixed 2 years, with no early get-out option - even if the contract terminates before the two years are up, the customer is still liable to pay the full two years' subscriptions.

This is a rip-off of monumental proportions.

Edit: they came back saying "The dedicated bandwidth is £1,350 per Meg. ". Excuse me while I go off to vomit.

Edited by mah (Mon 29-Jul-13 19:57:41)

Some recent test results - I have scripted testing by downloading from thinkbroadband (URL:http://ipv4.download.thinkbroadband.com/50MB.zip):

2013-07-29 08:56:43 : 1:41.41
2013-07-29 09:56:52 : 1:51.35
2013-07-29 10:58:01 : 2:59.89
2013-07-29 11:56:56 : 1:55.14
2013-07-29 12:57:36 : 2:35.93
2013-07-29 13:57:53 : 2:52.37
2013-07-29 14:58:02 : 3:01.35
2013-07-29 15:58:20 : 3:18.73
2013-07-29 16:59:25 : 4:23.51
2013-07-29 17:56:42 : 1:41.14
2013-07-29 18:57:02 : 2:00.75
2013-07-29 19:56:52 : 1:51.45

For a 50MB file these times vary between poor (100s = 5Mbps) down to pathetic (263s = 1.9Mbps). What is bizzarre is that the speeds this evening are merely poor, and it was much worse during the day.

This is what I have suggested to tooway:

I did the calculations. I believe that the downstream capacity of the spotbeam is a bit under 500 Mbit/s. Allowing for 20 M download and a contention ratio of 25 to 1 that only allows 625 users before the system is usually in a state of overload. Higher download speeds made the system more unstable.

My suggestion is that tooway reduces the monthly price by £5 as a goodwill gesture and drops the max download to 10 or even back to 8. That should mean that the system will be in a normal state more often and should avoid frequent slow downs. 8 is more than enough for streaming and I would rather have reliable 8 than flaky 20.

Another idea that if upload capacity can be transferred to become download capacity then the upload could go down to 2 or 3. Assuming that tooway do not envisage people setting up servers on their own premises then 6 is far more than needed.

PeterScott.

Sounds like a potential plan BUT it wont work. These kinds of services sell to the end user because of the headline speed of 20mb. If they reduced it to 10mb it would not look as attractive to potential customers.

I'm in spot beam 34 and speeds are well down throughout the day at the moment. I spoke to my ISP and thy said it was down to the school holidays...

Don't get me wrong though. I'm not dissing your proposal at all. We don't really need 20mb at all. I also have a lower speed satellite service from another provider and that's only 5 down, 1 up. This service has much less contention and is happily covering my kids thirst for Youtube and so on...

Hi Fludge

I understand your point but in fact many of us signed up when it was 6 / 1 Mbit/s. For people suffering very poor speeds in the country, or elsewhere, that was a great leap forward especially as it was *always* 6. Then the speeds were progressively upped till we reached 20 / 6. I remember thinking at the time that this was dangerous with such a limited pipe. And so it has proved. My point is that tooway is in trouble as are its users and can't just muck about with unfair and arbitrary limits and justifications.Sometimes we have to compromise to get collective benefit. This is one of those times I think.


I don't want to stop using tooway though I am trying out the landline again as an experiment. But if I am only to get 2 or 3 M I don't want to pay £40 a month. I can get slightly less for £6.

All the best

Peter

i should point out that I have both services...

My Tooway 20/6 unlimited which is suffering at the moment. I only signed up at the beginning of June and its gone down hill since then.

Ive had the dish realighed and the modem swapped. Skylogic also popped a different firmware version on the modem to try and speed things up. They are trying but I dont think they are trying hard enough.

My other sat installation is the 5/1 from another provider and whilst its slower, its more stable. Ideally I would like to see a bit more speed from it, say 10/2 but its OK...

I have ADSL available at my property but it was a poor 2.1/384k service and often disconnected so i ditched it for satellite.

when I signed up I saw the headline speeds of 20/6 and thought WOW... Have some of that.... At first it was excellent. Managed to chew through 70gb in under 4 weeks without trying hard but now its all over the place.

I don't think that the problem lies with the hardware or the software. You can see details of your signals by connecting to the modem through your network. I think the problem is with the pipe and contention. Instead of an M62 we now have an M25.

Absolutely agree that its contention.

Spot beams 23 and 34 in the south of England are at capacity now. I have mentioned this to my ISP and have recommended they advise Tooway accordingly. I suspect they wont have said anything about that though and will continue signing up new customers on these beams...

Hi JamJam

I have exactly the same issues with my Avonline Satellite Tooway service the reasons are listed below :-

I have the unlimited product @ £65 per month!

It has become limited to the point that it is unusable very quickly.

The Fair Access Policy was implemented by Tooway and Avonline in July. The Unlimited FAP limit is 60GB download over a four week rolling period, (not reset at the start of the month).

When you hit that you are moved into a overfilled heavy users pool which reduces the performance to a crawl, all your web sites time out, download speeds of 100k only,yes 100k only are not uncommon, the service becomes unusable the only way to get out of the cycle is not to use the service for several days to get your four week rolling period back below 60gb.

Effectively the Unlimited service should be now sold as 60GB it is NOT UNLIMITED!

60GB is the equivalent of half a HD movie a day.

Its clear Tooway have oversold the bandwidth and are now in deep trouble meeting demand. This results in an appalling service all round.

If they are to move users that exceed the secret FAP policy (which has not been published in detail)into a heavy users pool it should still meet a minimum performance level which it does not. Effectively if you hit the heavy user pool your are DOOMED!

I am trying my landline again using the very low cost offer from Talktalk. If its no good, or TT is no good, I won't have lost much. If BT has to get the line up to spec for the new TT connection it might be fine.

Tooway are a classic case of bad management. They clearly haven't done the simple sums that I did above, nor thought with clarity about the service they want to offer and their likely customers. A good manager responds to problems and complaints with good communication and clear, logical action. Don't see any of that in tooway.