Satellite broadband-available in the UK?

[bull996]

Helloooo.

A guy I work with is moving house and has been told that due to the phone lines he will not be able to get broadband.

Can you get broadband down a satellite dish in the UK?

Cheers

[CaptainSlow]

Interesting, how would you upload?

[bull996]

No idea!

I used these people in the US and it seemed to work OK (I am not technical so I have no idea how it works)

http://www.hughesnet.com/

Edited by bull996 on Wednesday 5th May 10:36

[Alex]

Google "satellite broadband" and the first result is:

http://www.avonlinebroadband.co.uk/

Apparently download and upload speeds are good, but the ping time is poor with satellite broadband.

[Plotloss]

CaptainSlow said:

Interesting, how would you upload?

Traditionally, via dialup...

Though Alex's link seems to communicate back to the satellite via the dish, which is interesting...

Edited by Plotloss on Wednesday 5th May 10:41

[Ynox]

Google VSAT if you want to find out how they upload.

To be honest I'd go for a 3g dongle if you've got coverage. Sat latency is pretty poor. Or try your luck with convincing BT to attempt ADSL.

Traditionally in the UK you'd use sat for your downstream (unicast ~1MBit, multicast ~12MBit iirc) and either 56k or ISDN for upstream.

[HellDiver]

BT used to provide the service. It was pure ste - couldn't even do email properly, never mind browsing the web. Not recommended.

[old No 1]

I did a project last year for Camelot to upgrade all the lottery machines and use VSAT on all shops as the cost of the BT ISDN was expensive. We did 19k installs in 9 months and now you can see a huge dish on most newsagents . The system basically works as a linux based PC and a sat broadband system. Worked quite well until weather conditions (snow and heavy rain ) stopped systems ! But we had to be super careful on set up , and as I had ex sky installers for a lot of my staff they were in the 'F8ck it it will be good enough' frame of mind on sig strength and loss sometimes it could be hit and miss.
The cost of it may be prohibitive but go for a 1m dish and good quality LNB and cable ( we had a limit of 120m on most installs) and it will work ok. Dish and VSAT equip looks fugly tho !

OT but just been to Everest base camp and they use VSAT up as far as 5100m and maybe soon at the base camp itself ! was reasonably fast too, not 20mb but 2mb at a push
It uploads via the dish as well no phone line needed

Edited by old No 1 on Tuesday 11th May 12:19

[JD]

In the blackspot I live in, someone up the road has a TooWay Sat broadband dish

the price is very high, with massive cappings on data usage and dreadful ping times

[gmoney68]

I hear you can get 10mb speeds on satellite broadband. Try here: http://www.broadbandwherever.net

[davido140]

I had a brief forray installing satellite broadband a few years ago.

So yes you can get it, and no he doesnt want it... Probably better and cheaper to get a 3G dongle, you can get a 3G router that'll do the same job as a DSL typer router/wifi access point if thats what he wants.

Satellite broadband is expensive and the latency ("ping times" as everyone insists on calling it) is appalling, 1400ms round trip is normal, it's a long way up to a geostaionary sat, 22,000 miles even at pretty much the speed of light takes a little while! Compare that to the 30-60ms you're used to at home and you see the problem. There are technologies to get around some of the latency limitations (ACK spoofing/large window sizes/etc), but not all of them, gaming would be a non-starter, web browsing can be frustrating when sites consist of many objects each requiring a separate request to the server.

Not sure if they use smaller antenntas now but I used to install whopping great things 1.5-2m IIRC and the BUC was the size of a big book. probably moved on a bit since then though. 10Mbps was top whack back then too and cost the earth. (8 years ago-ish BTW)

[khushy]

we had SatBB in about 1999 - 2002 when they finally installed copperBB - it was good both up and down - but as said above the latancy (ping time) drove me bonkers!!!

khushy

[FlossyThePig]

Have a look at Inmarsat, head office in London so I assume it's a British company.

A few years ago a fellow commuter was testing their portable gear (about the size of a large laptop). Broadband anywhere as they claim 99.9% global coverage from their own satellites.