Satellite ISP Tariam says it can help to fill the UK's rural broadband gaps and meet the governments Universal Service Commitment (USC), which aims to make a minimum broadband download speed of 2Mbps available to everybody by 2015. Tariam's boss was speaking in reaction to last week's news that the USC target had slipped from 2012 to 2015.


Walwyn claims that the only criticism of a satellite broadband route is that inevitably there’s the cost of the hardware, which can be priced at anything from several hundred to several thousand pounds; depending on your choice of ISP and satellite.

However this overlooks the techs other problem areas, such as high latency hampering the usability of VoIP, multiplayer gaming and some VPN solutions. Upload speeds can also be poor and usage allowances - at least those at viable levels of consumer pricing - tend to be very meagre.


In fairness solutions like Eutelsat's Tooway and Avanti's future HYLAS1 service are now significantly faster and more affordable than ever before. This means that a Satellite service can finally offer a viable alternative, provided you only require fairly basic but fast internet access.

In the coming months both Avanti and Eutelsat will have even faster generations of broadband satellites in orbit around the earth, offering speeds of 8-10Mbps. It remains to be seen how these will impact existing packages and prices.