bigblu Reviews

I am a business broadband user living in a rural area: I currently have a BT Fixed Line ADSL service. Because I live so far from the nearest exchange (3 miles), I get a maximum speed of 1.2mpbs download on the BT line - which is not quite enough to have a hassle-free service.

I was recommended Avonline by an IT consultant as good for remote rural users. I talked to Avonline, explaining I wanted to run a Cloud desktop and an VOIP phone for my home office. No problem, they said, you will get minimum 13mbps download - more than enough to do both.

I shelled out in the region of £700 for the satellite dish, satellite stand and installation: only to find:

* the very high latency of the service made working on a cloud desktop impossible;

* the connection was anyway unstable, and the cloud desktop kept dropping out;

* the VOIP phone was unable to function: the technical team were unable to resolve this;

* streaming was also very poor - so we couldn't even use it for domestic use.

Weirdly, my BT ADSL line gave a much preferable user experience, at only 1.2mbps - one tenth of what Avonline 'guaranteed'.

Having tried it for a few more weeks, to no avail, I called them up to cancel, and was asked to send an e-mail. I did so on 5 June. No response. I sent another e-mail. No response. I called again. Finally got a response. Apparently I was just outside the cancellation period. I asked them to buy back the satellite equipment, which they said they would do.

In the meantime, invoices kept arriving for July. etc etc etc. I am still waiting for any call about the buy back, £900 in the hole of a service that never worked as advertised.

So, whatever you do, I would advise against this service unless you have absolutely no other broadband options; because clearly even a very limited fixed line service is a lot better than a satellite service.

OMG Europasat have got to be THE worst company I have ever had the misfortune to do business with. I will not go into detail but will just ask customers who are maybe thinking of using their satellite service to at least perform due diligence and read some of the God awful Europasat reviews available around the web, I wish I had.

I have just come to the end of a 24 month contract (thank God) and now find that their website blatantly lies about returning their equipment.
In their sales pages the site clearly stats that they will send a FREE courier bag for you to return the equipment after your contract ends.
This is an outright lie and if you ask for such they will point you to their terms that says you have to pay for the return of equipment.

Plus, be prepared for more or less useless speeds in the free time period. When I complained about this their reply was that the speeds will be slow because that's when everyone uses the service and that customers should be buying bandwidth upgrades (at 10 pounds per 1GB) that would work out at 10 pounds per decent YouTube video you watched.

A few words of warning. . .
Stay well clear of Europasat

Avoid Avonline at all costs. They have only one concern, and that it is to get as much money from you as they possible can.

I have just finished a 12 month contract with them. The speed was okay, but as soon as I went over my 20gig allowance, without warning I was throttled on speed to make it unusable.
Then they hold you to ransome - they will sell additional gigs to you for £10 per gig!

Now that I have finished with them, they want all their equipment back. They are not bothered at all that I am still using the dish for Freesat television, and that they sold me £200 worth of lnb's and activiation costs to receive Freesat.

They can sell me the dish at £300 ! Are they not about £100 new ?
So, now they are threatening me with legal action. What a dreadful, greedy company.

I can not recommend them at all.

Virgin have now blocked, via Websafe the company Avonline from advertising, focusing on the risk to users.

Having a slow and dropping out Broadband service I was advised to contact the company concerned and was ASSURED repeatedly that I would receive 10 gigabytes of usage. I BOUGHT the equipment, and paid in advance for everything. I explained that I intended that it would be for a business, and again received assurances.

No films were downloaded and neither was there any streaming. After 8 days, the system was cancelled and the reason, when I enquired was that my usage agreement had been exceeded. My Son in Law is an IT lead engineer for a multinational company and I asked for his advice. He gave me the questions for A/l. It seems that instead of 10 gigaBYTES, I'd actually used 10 gigaBITS. The figures were supplied by A/l.

A/l accepted that their monitoring system wasn't accurate. No shit, but by 90%?

It was suggested that I double my account, and so would pay double the monthly rental, which I now discover, is their system of plastering over their problems. I refused, bluntly!

I have recently received an invoice threatening Court action for them to reclaim £520 for the equipment which I've failed to return, and for which I've already paid £180.

The MD is a guy called Mark Winner. Try him but he's as slippery as the rest of them. I've now contacted Watchdog, and if enough follow my example, then this scam will be revealed for what it is!

Do not go anywhere near this outfit, seriously bad money grabbing outfit.

I am going to post this on every forum I can find. I may not be able to stop them single handed but I can certainly cost them a lot more in lost business than they are screwing out of me...

To stop you leaving they task you with climbing up the side of your house, removing their dish and equipment and then having to fund returning a large dish, pole and everything else (presumably they'll even want the rawl plugs and screws out of the wall or they'll charge you for that) - see copy of their email below.




THEIR EMAIL...


Thank you for your request to terminate your account.

Your contract on the account is for 24 months starting on 12/11/2013 ending 11/11/2015. Please note that you are liable for charges up to the end of the contract date.

You will need to make arrangements to return the satellite equipment within 14 days of the account being terminated.

The notice period is 30 days' notice and then we would raise a final invoice for the months outstanding.

When it works it is very fast, but you need to wake up after midnight.

When I bought it the salesperson mae it very clear that thry will put more satellites up to ensure there is always plenty on bandwidth - well that was a total 100% lie.

The download speed isw worse than BT in a country village -

These guys provide a lousy service - and today emailed me saying they will charge me £10 per motnh unless I move to direct debit - total scumbags and im off to Ofcom

I pay £65.00 a month for this rubbish. If you want broadband between 11.00pm and 5.00pm then it works fine most of the time , speeds vary between 10mbs and 20mbs.

If you want to use it between 5.00pm and 11.00pm don't bother , speeds are regularly 2mbs , I bought this to stream movies and bbd player and they don't work.

This is a complete con, they have cut down the packages in terms of which data you get and now there are so many users the whole system gets jammed.

LEAVE WELL ALONE.

I agreed with Rural-Dweller's comments - the service from this company is horrendous. Not only do we regularly experience less than 1mb download speed we are paying a fortune for the privilege. We signed up in March of this year - so far we have paid them over £330 for a rubbish service. We are not heavy users and only browse online - we are not streaming films or gaming or anything like that.
On one occasion when I phoned to try to find out why it is so poor I was told it was because the kids were on school holidays!!! How the hell other peoples children not being in school in the daytime affects my evening broadband speeds I will never know. This is the kind of helpful answer that you get from them.
I can't wait for fibre to reach our village - we will be cancelling our contract with Europasat like a shot. In fact we are considering going back to BT until then as we would pay considerably less for a comparable service.
I have a long commute every day and have the facility to work from home occasionally as my employer is very accommodating - unfortunately, the service from Europasat is so bad that I can't take up this option.
Don't sign up with them - avoid at all costs and look at other alternatives.

Living very rurally, we were able to access the Welsh assembly's grant - thank goodness. If I had paid for the set up I would be on anti-depressants right now. The speeds of "up to 20mbps are actually 3 - 4 mbps. Strange that Tooways' own speed checker consistently rates speeds 5X faster that every other speed checker out there. Granted we can watch YouTube vids now without the constant buffering that we had before and the speed at 3mbps is faster than our previous 0.2 speed, but when you add ping times into the equation it doesn't seem much faster. Add to that the weakness of the signal which means noticeable diminution for every metre you are away from the modem - forget using your Kindle's wireless facility in bed. When you consider what you are paying for a meagre 10GB limit, and the fact that regardless of whether you have spent months under the limit, the throttle back when you step over the line is immediate and so reined in that you cannot even check your email - unless you want to pay an extortionate £10 for 1GB. Plus their business model is such that the more money they make - by signing up more suckers, the worse the service is as it is a 'divide by the number of users' supply. If we ever have an alternative I will stop using Europasat like a shot.

...Save yourself time, money and stress by avoiding TooWay & Avon Line.