Which satellite broadband is best?

George Davis

I've just been offered the following:
Satellite two-way internet etc. 2Mps download, 512Kps up. Installation Eur450 then Eur40 p.m. with no cap - is this possible?

cgarvey

Read the T&C. They will have an AUP that will limit the "no cap". No satellite provider could afford a true unlimited service at those speeds for that price.

uncle_sam_ie

George Davis wrote:

I've just been offered the following:
Satellite two-way internet etc. 2Mps download, 512Kps up. Installation Eur450 then Eur40 p.m. with no cap - is this possible?

Who's doing that?

Sponge Bob

Beware of snake oil satellite system salesmen and make sure the company selling it has been around for a while and looks likely to continue in business.

There are 4 or 5 Irish suppliers who fit that category so make sure you get the gear from one of them. The gear is WORTHLESS if they go out of business.

At least with the one way systems the gear is standard (a DVB-S card like a Technisat Skystar for €70 ) so a smack of the lump hammer on the dish and you are pointing at a new supplier if the old one 'disappears' .....and these guys come and go all the time believe me.

thebman

netwhizkid wrote:

I use Skydsl 1mbps service for €16.90 per month with 1gig of download allowance included and if i go over that then it is 1.5¢ per MB. It is quite good, however the Dial-Up is a wallet killer unless you go for one of the Higher up flat rate packages available from Eircom. That would provide too many hours for my requirements however and would be more expensive then! It is a brilliant service to use and makes the Internet usable again! Only snag is you are limited to 44Kbps Upload or whatever dial-up speed you use. It works with ISDN too, but requires an Pentium III ideally a Pentium 4 processor and doesnt work with MAC or other non-windows systems or at least it didn't when i signed up 6 months ago. It is self install and aligning the dish to Telecom 2D at 8° West is very tricky, I myself had to buy a Satellite Meter from Ebay to align the dish at a cost of €160.

edit

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We had no problems aligning the satellite. Lidl sell free to air satellite dishes and generally sell a locator which won't tell you which satellite your point it at. Using provided SkyDSL software we were able to find the correct signal. The SkyDSL software (DVBData) tells you signal strength & quality and has a TTS feature which will play audio of the quality level so you can turn your speakers up loud or have someone else in your family monitor it for you.

My point being we got it setup with everything included but a 15 quid (I think) satellite finder that just emits a loud noise when pointed at any satellite.

The one we used was something like this:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Satellite-Finder-Sat-Finder-Sat-Meter-SatFinder-5-99_W0QQitemZ330027274018QQihZ014QQcategoryZ4693QQcmdZViewItem

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We use Perlico 180 for the dialup line so it ends up being 45 Euro a month or so overall with same SkyDSL package.

Perlico works well enough for my area. Support is a nightmare but then I didn't use it other than for initial setup.

SkyDSL offer a download service so you don't have to be on dial up when downloading (if you know how to copy the URL address of the download).

They offer offline webpages (most are useless, BBC's is on their list and gamespot and The Times).

They offer cost capping services so you can limit how much you can go over your allocated bandwidth (these resets to 100 Euro default every month so you have to set it each month which is a pain and you can't set it to zero, one Euro is lowest).

You can use it over a network through the provided proxy server with the software they give you.

The hardware is free (50 Euro shipping).


Overall it's good enough for web browsing and downloading email. I don't send large emails though. Despite what they say it works for P2P clients but you won't be able to upload a lot to other people so bittorrent might not work correctly but Limewire works.

netwhizkid

^^ brim4brim gave a pretty good analysis of Skydsl there.

Did you use the Lidl dish (80cms) for your set-up ?? I bought one of these about three weeks ago and find it quite good but am using a Channel Master 80cms I bought off www.satellite.ie for my Skydsl set-up. I had trouble but the meter I bought soon fixed it. I also have one of those smaller meters and they are okay and I have used it to pick up a few satellites on the Lidl dish but couldn't locate Telecom 2D when I went looking. I am using BT Anytime 180 at €26.99 per month for my dial-up. So it is costing me €43.89 a month for the two combined. I am hoping to have DSL within 12 months hopefully... Crosses fingers.

Altreab

damo605 wrote:

Have you tried www.rapidbroadband.ie (Absolutely brilliant) or www.digitalforge.ie (No experience of them) as they offer wireless broadband covering a good bit of West Cork from €25 per month?
I know with digiweb 2 way satellite it's about a grand for the install and about 100 euro per month but you get 512 down and 128 up for that - latency is a bugger alright but in general it's still a million times better than dial-up if you're not gaming online or anything like that. Monthy quotas are tight though, maybe only about 3 gig on the basic package!

I have used Digiweb Sat in the past and found it to be good within its limits. If you get the cheaper package.To maintain the speeds at the Rated 512K you need to be using closer to 2Gig than 3Gig. If you go over that you find your actual max download speed from about 8AM to 8PM 7 days a week drops to half the rated. from 8PM to 8AM its back to full speed.BUT the rolling download average remains. Also if you go to higher total bandwidth usage speeds are dropped again. :eek:
so dont go .downloading large software packages as some of us found out
Also if your on the west coast get the bigger dish ....the standard one is really not up to it in very cloudy or rainy weather.
Also if your building sites with loads of small files you may in fact be quicker using dial-up than satellite because of Lag.

thebman

netwhizkid wrote:

^^ brim4brim gave a pretty good analysis of Skydsl there.

Did you use the Lidl dish (80cms) for your set-up ?? I bought one of these about three weeks ago and find it quite good but am using a Channel Master 80cms I bought off www.satellite.ie for my Skydsl set-up. I had trouble but the meter I bought soon fixed it. I also have one of those smaller meters and they are okay and I have used it to pick up a few satellites on the Lidl dish but couldn't locate Telecom 2D when I went looking. I am using BT Anytime 180 at €26.99 per month for my dial-up. So it is costing me €43.89 a month for the two combined. I am hoping to have DSL within 12 months hopefully... Crosses fingers.

Well we had the free to air satellite from Lidl and we unsubscribed to Sky digital so we had a free dish lying round. Finding Telecom 2D was difficult enough but a bit of random knocks to the dish when we were close got us it.

Should also add SkyDSL have a minimum contract length of 6 months to the service but you can cancel within the first 15/16 days if you are unsatisfied (read T&C for exact number of days). This only starts ticking when you have logged on to the service for the first time so it's from the time you start using it and not the time you subscribe.

Computly Mad!

Looking for Broadband in West Clare, no wireless or cable etc. available. Searched google, Mediasat (www.mediasat.ie) offer a satellite service for €9.99 a month for 256kb/s, any good. 512 type wouldn't be too bad either, use the internet mainly for downloads (media player updates, apps etc.). Would I need to use the phone line for this too?

Any help!!!

Sponge Bob

nw w clare and sw w clare near the coast have wireless

echristie

Just to give feedback on this thread. After a 12 month campaign to drum up interest in Inchigeelagh village, Digital Forge have put up a new wireless relay mast. They were very helpful. I have the 38 euro/month service (1Mb/1MB) fully wireless throughout the house. It's flying. If I can just sort out mobile phone data services now .........