Page 1 of 2

Satellite Broadband

PostPosted:Fri Aug 11, 2017 6:54 pm
by Miscellaneous
Any experts on above on the forum?

I received a Tooway modem and naively expected to connect it to the dish and my Time Capsule to join the online world once again. Alas it didn't work.

Can anyone advise compatibility, or likely issue?

TIA

Re: Satellite Broadband

PostPosted:Fri Aug 11, 2017 11:21 pm
by Ian Melville
The only Tooway modem I installed had its own dish and whacking great LNB (or whatever).
I was not impressed with the system. Latency was a big issue, especially as we were trying to FTP small image files to a web server.

Now have Radio link to a local village. Cheaper, faster and no noticeable latency.

Re: Satellite Broadband

PostPosted:Sat Aug 12, 2017 6:15 pm
by jaycee58
You need a largish dish with a TRIA (Transmit and Receive Integrated Amplifier) connected to a Tooway modem with the dish pointed at KA-SAT. I'm not sure it's even possible to get connected without a satellite ISP. If it is, I'd like to know how!

When I first got satellite internet it was ok but the service is considerably poorer than it was when I was first connected. Daytime speeds are often as low as 6 or 7 mb/s and it really only gets up to 20mb/s after midnight. I'm hoping to change to a radio-based system soon.

Photo below shows my dish.
Image

Re: Satellite Broadband

PostPosted:Sat Aug 12, 2017 9:42 pm
by Miscellaneous
Thanks for the replies. :thumleft:

It's a new property we are moving to which already has the dish, on connecting the modem I failed to get it to work. I have since found a booklet online which may help when I get back to the house.

The neighbours' tell me it's not as good as a landline, but workable.

BT give a download range of 750k-2.5Mb, so no choice really. :(

Interestingly next door advise the BT broadband is so bad BT provide it, but don't charge.

Re: Satellite Broadband

PostPosted:Sat Aug 12, 2017 10:45 pm
by fov
Is there anyone within line of sight (or even a mid point to bounce between) with decent connectivity? Any FTTC in the area?
If you could get a point to point to them it could be better service. But does need someone reasonably local with connectivity to share.

Re: Satellite Broadband

PostPosted:Sat Aug 12, 2017 10:52 pm
by Miscellaneous
My understanding is BT will be putting a cabinet with fibre about 1km away within the next year or so. Until then everyone in the area appears to use satellite, it's kinda remote.

Re: Satellite Broadband

PostPosted:Sat Aug 12, 2017 10:57 pm
by fov
Probably best to make do for now then.
But equally, expect 1 year from BT to be 3 years ;)

Re: Satellite Broadband

PostPosted:Sun Aug 13, 2017 8:18 am
by Colonel Panic
jaycee58 wrote:Daytime speeds are often as low as 6 or 7 mb/s and it really only gets up to 20mb/s after midnight.

I can only dream of getting speeds of as fast as 6Mbps :(

Location: Deepest darkest Home Counties
:roll:

Re: Satellite Broadband

PostPosted:Mon Aug 14, 2017 10:30 pm
by George
I have a system from Avanti via Avonline.com based in Bristol. 'Twas the only way as BT is dreadful here. 12-13mbs down and 1.5 up. Stable and a must have as work from home.

Re: Satellite Broadband

PostPosted:Tue Aug 15, 2017 9:15 pm
by Miscellaneous
Well, up and running eventually.

The problem was the requirement for a router. I had been using my Time Capsule with a Draytek Vigor 130 which provided a WiFi network through the TC. This didn't work with the Tooway modem.

Anyone able to explain why?

So far (an hour) the performance seems very slow. We'll see how it does over time.

Re: Satellite Broadband

PostPosted:Wed Aug 16, 2017 7:43 am
by vw-dan
Miscellaneous wrote:So far (an hour) the performance seems very slow. We'll see how it does over time.


I'm going to be honest, I wouldn't hold out much hope of it ever being great. Satellite broadband often has very very high latency (I.e., the time it takes for you to talk to something and it to talk back). To give you some idea, you probably have an inherent latency of 200 - 300+ milliseconds. Most of us here can probably speak to Google with ~5ms and something in New York at around 80ms due to the use of undersea fibre optic cables.

Unfortunately, modern websites are very "chatty" - whereas in the olden days you connected to a website and downloaded it there's now lots of back and forth, even after the page has loaded. For you, this'll result in very slow page loads.

Check out Speedtest.net if you like and post the results to give us an idea.

Re: Satellite Broadband

PostPosted:Wed Aug 16, 2017 11:30 am
by stevelup
Miscellaneous wrote:The problem was the requirement for a router. I had been using my Time Capsule with a Draytek Vigor 130 which provided a WiFi network through the TC. This didn't work with the Tooway modem.

Anyone able to explain why?


Your Time Capsule will have been configured for PPPoE. You need to open the Airport Utility, click on the TC, click on Internet connection and change 'Connect Using:' from PPPoE to DHCP

Re: Satellite Broadband

PostPosted:Wed Aug 16, 2017 5:53 pm
by Miscellaneous
Thanks Steve, did the trick. :thumleft:

Having been advised the TC would not work with the satellite modem I now have a router which, as I initially thought, is surplus to requirements, :roll:

Re: Satellite Broadband

PostPosted:Wed Aug 16, 2017 6:32 pm
by stevelup
You know where to get the best technical support.... ;)

Re: Satellite Broadband

PostPosted:Wed Aug 16, 2017 6:52 pm
by rikur_
Miscellaneous wrote:So far (an hour) the performance seems very slow. We'll see how it does over time.

As others have said the main issue with satellite broadband is latency (remember those old TV interviews with the 2 second pause?)
There is a fair bit of tinkering that can sometimes be done to improve it (after you've confirmed that the dish alignment is not a problem).
One trick is increasing the maximum number of concurrent connections for the web-browser .... by default Windows only allows 6 connections at a time to a website - i.e. it fetches the main page, this might reference 50 images/scripts/etc, and it then fetches them 6 at a time ... but on a Satellite connection you lose 500 msecs between each batch of 6, so increase 6 to 30 or similar. Google 'changing ConnectionsPerHostname'
If I recall correctly, Firefox allows better control of these settings than most browsers.
Alternatively Chrome has an extension called "Data Saver" - this routes http traffic via Google servers and often merges many small files into fewer files - certainly worth trying (but note it doesn't touch https traffic, so won't speed up secure websites).
At a more technical level, it can be worth running a local caching DNS server, as using an internet hosted DNS server means each request to look-up a new domain takes 500msecs - some routers will act as a caching DNS server themselves .... others simply relay requests upstream. If you keep seeing "Resolving host..." in the status bar, it is likely that all your DNS requests are being sent back out to the internet at a 0.5s penalty each..