Avonline / Tooway / Skylogic

I switched to Satellite Broadband provided by Avonline as 20mb speeds were quite appealing after receiving speeds of 1mb and below from Orange.

Initially no real probe, speed tests suggest I wasnt getting close to 20mb very often but it worked.

For past three weeks, the service takes a dive in the evening, I thought this started about 7pm but having tried it earlier, its more like 5pm and today about 4pm. Speedtests provided by Avonline suggest I am getting 20mb and 5mb upload but all other tests suggest between 1 and 2mb download and ?? upload.

Often their own speedtest stalls on the upload all together or eventually returns a result of 0.1mb or similar

As a family, we come home from work and school and want to watch things online at a time to suit us as terrestrial tv is a bit dire. The service is unavailable at this key time and remains down until 1 or 2 am.

After calling several times a day and following all advice, done tests, waited etc .... three weeks later I still have no improvement and I am paying £65 per month for ???

The technical line is usually answered by Adam or Stewart and the requests are usually 'do a speedtest' and we will monitor it overnight .... last weekend the reason given was maintenance on the satellite and it should all be ok now - it wasn't. Today after three calls, and Adam taking 5 mins out to speak to someone else, the reason given is ....... it's high volume users spoiling it for the rest of you good guys.

This doesnt wash. The problem would affect everyone using Satellite Broadband, My area, UK, Europe. It would be all over the internet, their phone lines would be jammed, there would be some urgency and pressure to sort it out, there would be an immediate answer on the phone instead of 'mmm thats unusual'

Its implied that everyone is affected, I dont think thats the case at all.

I have been fed a load of bull.

So can I reach out to the wider world and ask for other peoples experiences please, if there are other forums or avenues to follow please advise

used to be with eclipse on their upto 8 mb service, was up and down like a [censored] yo-yo, initially quite good and slowly got worse with a few fast spots.

One day there was a fire in their data centre and the speeds went to as close as possible max speed. then watched it drop by 1 mb per hour back down to 50kbs and apparently that was ok.

MAC swiftly followed

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/2814298960 - been with merula ever since, not the cheapest but the boss pays most of it

Tech support are very good as will usually do the obvious stuff 1st like a router reboot first and not have the need to do "tests" at home

worth posting your local exchange as can give more options, am on a legacy product (unlimited), but will recommend them to others

I was interested to read your post as I recently signed up to Avonline primarily for streaming movies from Netflix. Their website promises reliably high speed downloads but to date the download speeds have been anything but reliable. I had a couple of evening last week which were ok but the latter end of the week downloads average between 1-4 MBps, and as you mentioned, this seems to be most of the evening from about 6pm - midnight. Speedtests in the morning before I leave for work usually average 20MBps as they should. I too spoke to Avonline who reported these problems to Tooway and told me that the response was 'a small number of users downloading high volumes of data (terabytes) were slowing the service for others. They stated that Tooway are trying to address this issue by limiting the data stream for high level users. I was told to give it a few days but I'm not hopeful. I'd be grateful in any updates you have. Where are you? I am in Sheffield, UK.

If this does is not rectified then I will be forced to terminate my contact with them after only a couple of months.

Is anyone else having a simlar problem?

Paul, Sheffield

Does this not depend on what you mean by "anybody"?

There is a world of a difference between the bandwidth on the satelilte transponder shared by "many" users and the bandwidth purchased by the ISP to reach the internet.

If the satellite or terrestrial bandwidth purchased is too low (especially the bandwidth and contention) then you will be slowed down by other users who are getting a higher lever of priority.

Satellite is always going to be a limited resource but I think your only answer is to go elsewhere.

Do you still have your ADSL connection? I think you should.

Which packages are you guys on?

Only their £64.95 package seems to offer unlimited usage.

There was a tougher set of throttling a while ago but this was removed in January
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/5688-tooway-satel...

So it may that too many people are using the unlimited package in an unlimited way now.

The question is really whether the issue is KA transponder capacity - very difficult to fix or the Internet feeds on the ground which are obviously easier to upgrade.

I am on the XL package, one down from the unlimited package. Data download limited to 30GB per month but unlimited after 11am. Avonline still offer 20MBPS download and 5MBPS uploads on the above data capped tarrif. The support team said that it was a number of users on the unlimited packages that were taking advantage of the unlimited download allowance and were heavy users, thus limited the 'data stream' for other lighter users. I don't know how true this is - I'm going to give it another week and review the situation. I believe the contract is for 12 months, although I didn't sign anything - I would have thought that I could cancel the contract if they cannot deliver on the promised download speeds.

There are 82 spotbeams and each one can support 475 Mbps on a KA satellite. I think about three of these cover the full UK.

So 20 unlimited users could cause a lot of issues if using the unlimited to its full extent in say North England, but someone down in the south west might be fine.

Hello Everybody! This is Moreno from Barcelona - Spain.

I just purchased a Tooway Max 20Mbps/6up Unlimited contract 24m, about a week ago, all the system worked great with download speeds even more then 24/25Mbps!! .. till today, Sunday.
I cannot get a downloading speed better then 1Mbps and 0.08 up!!

79.99 Euros per month, supposed to be at least 20Mbps (18..17..even 15), I can understand heavy traffic or what so ever, but from 20 to 1mbps.....!!!! it sounds really NO COMMENT!! this it is just ridiculous.

Very curious tomorrow morning to talk about this critical issue with the Tooway guys.

I will let you know their "version" just after. For the type of person which I am, when things are not as supposed at all, I always bring them straight back in any sorta of ways..... I really hope this it will not the case.

Ciao!

Moreno

This was bound to happen sooner or later, there is after all a finite capacity.

I however suspect that the satellite capacity is not yet overloaded but it is more likely that the purchased capacity on the satellite has been reached.

A trace route might show which link is overloaded, although with the inherit high latency on Satellite this might be hard to identify.

Any idea if this is a Tooway problem or just Avonline?

Edited by deleted (Sun 07-Jul-13 23:12:38)

I've noticed this started last month 7th June 2013 with AVOFFLINE.

When you run a speedtest @ http://speedprobe.skylogicnet.com/ it reports full speed.

Note: That the IP Address on the speedtest is using the routers IP.

If you run a speedtest @ http://speedtest.net/ it reports below < 1MBIT.

Note: That the IP Address on the speedtest from @ speedtest.net is not the same as the IP Address @ skylogicnet.com.

So what's going on?

Also I've noticed that every day consistently at 1:30AM exactly the speed magically jumps back to 20MBIT.

I think they "AVOFFLINE" are limiting everyone and are resetting the cap at 1:30AM because it's too consistent to be a fault.

Tel3koN