I too have seen in the past weeks a severe slowdown in the Avonline service.

BUT the main problem if the service drops out randomly and then comes back occasionally a "modem" reset is required.

The situation is actually worse than you think. It doesn't look as though the users on this forum have heard the latest. Tooway is slugging the speed of the connections once you have reached half of the data allowance you have paid for. Their excuse is that some users are hogging the capacity. As most people have modest data limits (mine is 20) it can only be the unlimited users that are doing this. Guess what? *There is no slugging for unlimited users! *

I am about to write a formal complaint to Ofcom about this. It is much worse than the 'up to' scandals. This is a deliberate slugging in contradiction of the terms of the contract, not a fair sharing of resources.

I have used tooway for two years and the speed problem is very recent. The overnight crashes were not, but at least I was always getting 20 Mbit/s or thereabouts until very recently. Tooway has sold more connections than they have capacity for or they are suffering genuine technical problems. Either way they need to tell us about it and do something about it.

There used to be the more complex sliding windows for speeds, which had hoped had gone, but interesting to see how this one plays out.

They're liars if they say they're capping the users that reach half the monthly bandwidth allowance/limit because It's been going slow from at the start of a new monthly bandwidth allowance/limit.

Also I do not think it's got anything to do with users downloading high amounts of data.

The reason being why would it jump back to 20MBIT at 1/1:30AM, do all the users that are downloading high amounts of data get together everynight and all decide to stop downloading at 1/1:30AM. I think not.

I think it's got something todo with ground The Network Operations Center (NOC) servers load, maybe they should invest some of the multi millions per month into more servers.

None of what they're telling people makes any sense. It was fine 2 months ago for 7 months straight.

I didn't mean that it has been the cause over the last month or two. I was alerting people to the fact that this is a new policy announced last week. Desperate measures?

Don't doubt you, but got a link to the new policy so can mention it in the news

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see a regular pattern of vastly diminished speeds that are consistent in times, duration and speeds achieved.

As a company, do they really think we're that gullible to believe these same users come home, get on the web together and stop using the web at the same time seven days a week?

I spoke to avonline last Wednesday, was assured they would have a response by Friday. I called today (Monday) to be told .... 'We expect a reply in 48 hours' its like Groundhog Day.

I also referenced 'forums' and others experiences. I referred to this capping to be told, ahh yes that's not news that's on our website front page. Hmmm well only recently and you've never mentioned it before.

If anyone has had experience with Unicom in the phone line world .... This may be heading for just an unpleasant experience.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next time I call support, there's a recorded message .... Welcome to avonline, how do you keep an idiot in suspense....' followed by me hanging on and on and on and on .....

Tooway Satellite Broadband Maintenance 17th July 2013

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Rural Broadband

PLANNED WORKS STATUS Starting

FROM:
17/07/2013 00:00:00 UTC

TO:
17/07/2013 06:00:00 UTC

EXPECTED IMPACT:
30 minutes

PLANNED WORKS DESCRIPTION:
Network Maintenance on Tooway on KA-SAT service

Thought I would post this information, probably won't change anything though.

Edited by deleted (Mon 15-Jul-13 23:43:52)

From the same source (Rural Broadband), which is a reseller for the true source Broadband Everywhere, this is how the new policy is written.

"Service Change

"A new policy has been implemented by Tooway (the platform operators) to help create a balanced network that is usable by all customers.

"Our services are built around the idea that light users pay less for their connection, and heavy users pay more based around how much data they use.

"This procedure ensures quality of service across all of our services, and no one experiences poor performance due to excessive use by a small handful of customers. If we did not implement a Fair Access Policy or FAP then we could experience poor speeds across the network with approx. 80% of all data allowance being consumed by approx. 20% of customers."

This original page had a link to a document setting out the terms. *All but unlimited users* have their speeds slugged when they have used half their data. The slugged speed was not specified. This is utterly illogical. 'Light users' will not use a lot of data due to their data limits. The heavy unlimited users are untouched. Presumably having committed to unlimited contracts the company doesn't want to upset the users.

BTW there have been several bits of Engineering Work lately. Didn't seem to to make any difference.

Avonline are a bunch of liars. Justin and Stewart will just lie to your face.

We carried an evaluation of various DSL suppliers for a specific project and after being assured by Avonline that Tooway met our needs we went with them. We told them we were manipulating video streams for a project with a defense contractor in the United States and that the throughput would be high. We asked specific questions about any data caps or restrictions for heavy use and were told that there wouldn't be any problems.

After a month we saw a huge degradation of service and regularly only got speeds of less than 1mb downstream while the upstream bandwidth remained at around 6mb. This of course made it unusable for what we were doing. i spoke to Justin the liar who told me that Skylogic were having problems on their network and were fixing it but it would take a couple of days. Not realizing he was talking to a network engineer he spouted a lot of complete [censored]. I didn't believe a word and called a contact we have at Skylogic who told me we were being restricted because of heavy use.

I had read this forum so I decided not to tell Avonline that I knew what was happening just to see how far they would take the lies. For 10 days they told me lie after lie after lie. They were shocked when I told them I knew that there were 2 tickets open on OSS and told them what Skylogic had replied to them NINE DAYS EARLIER!!!!!!

Because we work with US defense contractors we are required to record every incoming and outgoing telephone conversation. I have a copy of every single conversation we ever had with Avonline, including conversations about caps where thet assured me there were none.

Avonline are conmen and liars. DO NOT use them.

Dear Avonline, if you are reading this, get ready for Trading Standards' visit. They were very very interested in the call recordings. Justin, much better if you go back to South Africa.

Edited by deleted (Tue 16-Jul-13 19:10:08)