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42 Reviews
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Posted: 08th May, 2017    By: jp444
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Title: Rubbish
It worked for a few months quite well, now 200kb whenever I want to use it

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Posted: 27th Sep, 2016    By: inthezone
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The lack of response to faults has been really dire and it doesn't seem to matter whether faults and problems are reported via phone or email, they just don't respond or resolve things. We live in a rural area a long way area from the exchange and cabinet so having battled with slower than slow ADSL speeds for years, we finally decided enough was enough and switched to satellite at considerable extra expense.

As previous threads have reported, initially things seem quite promising, aside from the latency which is a pain but would be acceptable if everything else worked ok but it doesn't.

We have been unable to access key sites such as Lloyds, DVLA, survey monkey, Santander, M&S, Experian, Wordpress and Waitrose to name a few and get the same error message: This site can't be reached. The connection was reset' - this has been going on since June.

We've had an engineer out to check our satellite alignment - no change. I've since been waiting for a resolution and chased and chased to not get responses to any emails or phone calls returned. The last conversation one of their advisors said the problem was linked to Prolexic who control spam/phishing problems for major sites and our IP may have been in a range that they have blocked but still no confirmation or resolution.

The biggest bugbear though is the company's atrocious customer service which has been one of the worst I've experienced and the fact their recorded greeting says they are committed to giving you the best possible customer service or words to that effect is frankly laughable.

No way on earth would I recommend Avonline. The only reason I haven't yet cancelled and changed supplier is because we are possibly moving and I don't want to take out a new contract until we move.

Also, the data limits are a real pain and buying extra is very expensive and doesn't buy you nearly enough to last a month. We are not even heavy users as no kids, just 2 adults using email, internet and a bit of music+Netflix streaming but hardly anything and nowhere near as much as we'd like as the limits are too restrictive/costly.

Just not worth the money/hassle in my experience.


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Posted: 16th Sep, 2016    By: Simon60
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Title: Terrible
Europasat service is terrible in every possible way.
Most importantly, it really does not work very well. Lag times to open pages are usually about 20 seconds. I had to give up on music streaming as the speed simply wasn't up to it. The worst noted download speed was 20 BYTES (yes bytes!) per second - the photos I was trying to download would have taken 23 days. They claim that office hours are busy, and that evenings should be better - certainly not my experience. It took over 2 months to get it working properly - one month to identify which bit of the supplied hardware was faulty, another month of hours of telephone calls to get the router set properly for a Mac.
Their administration is probably even worse than their service though. Frequent promises of waiving a month's charges failed, emails confirming telephone promises never materialised. Their CEO appears to have ignored my letter of complaint. I eventually have given up on them. To their credit, I eventually found one person who dealt with my problems, and they have taken away all the hardware, refunded the costs of this and half of the airtime charges.
The problem appears to be insufficient capacity. Maybe one day this will be resolved. Satellite could be a proposition then if there is no other decent option (once connected, speeds do appear quite quick sometimes), but only if they sort out their admin as well.

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Posted: 06th Aug, 2016    By: blisko
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We decided to go with satellite broadband because our area had very bad internet connection.
I wish we did more research. They charge you so much money for installation, if you want to have wifi, for a year contract instead of 2 year one and it goes on and on.
We chose 30 GB. The fist month our data went up the roof so we increased it to 50Gb which is considerably more expensive.
We decided to terminate contract after 1 year arrange de-installation and to our surprise, Avonline wants to charge nearly £140 for it or if we let them know in 2 weeks "only" £90. Which I think is absolutely disgrace when you are charge for installation.
DO NOT USE AVONLINE!!!!!

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Posted: 29th May, 2016    By: doonhamer5
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Title: Terrible
We signed up to Tooway in early 2013 and it was taken over by Europasat.

It became clear early on that we needed an unlimited contract @ £99/month but it turns out there is no such thing as unlimited. If you go over 40GB usage they throttle the service in the evenings such that the speed is > 1MB/s, worse than the previous landline service.
Also, the latency of the service means that working from home over VPN is very very slow, e.g. 20 mins to save an excel spreadsheet to the server, 10 mins to send an email after pressing 'send'.

They have now put fibre broadband into our exchange and although we can't get it because we have an exchange-only line, the standard BT broadband is now working at 4-5MB/s and is consistently reliable, so it's time to ditch the Europasat service.

If you can't get a good landline service, there are specialists who can help. Don't sign up to satellite, it's not worth it.

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Posted: 10th Mar, 2016    By: HealthConsult
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We have paid for Avonline's satellite service for several years. They were very helpful in getting the system installed quickly but it was very expensive in up-front costs and has cost £40/month thereafter. I guess we have paid Avonline over £2,000 in total. Interestingly, when I told them I would be cancelling, they offered a reduced monthly fee 'for loyalty'. Shame they didn't think to offer that before ...

Unfortunately, the system has never performed satisfactorily. Latency makes it difficult to use with some remote servers, download speeds have been extremely variable and often poor, and signal dropout became so frequent that the system was practically unusable other than as an occasional backup to our conventional fixed BB.

It has been difficult to get technical support by phone and, when we have, the problems have never been resolved.

Our fixed BB is now far superior, and stable, so we have cancelled our Avonline service. Again, it was difficult to get answers when cancelling (including Avonline sending an email to an incomplete email address!). However, they were very quick to let me know that I had to return the equipment or be charged a further £360. Oh - they can pick it up for just £89.95.

I shall just be pleased to be rid of it.



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Posted: 16th Nov, 2015    By: MIKE MCHUGH
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If you live in the desert, and have no choice than just maybe its an option if nothing else is available. But the speed is very poor and erratic- I was told speed in theory was 22 MB download and 6M up. I pressed the sales person who told me that realistically I could expect "double figures". The truth is more like 5-6 download, and sometimes it it almost stops completely. I have had several calls to technical and the answer is not technical at all ! They simply over-sell the service - too much greed and hence too many subscribers. I have cancelled and gone back to ADSL which had minimal latency (23 ms) unlike satellite which is 750 ms.

Whatever you do, don't buy this if you can't get fibre and want something better than ADSL. It does not deliver (and they know it !!)



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Posted: 01st Oct, 2015    By: morphil
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I have been with Avonline for over 2 years. Things started out well and I regularly achieved 10Mbps+. Over time, however, the quality of the speeds has deteriorated and after 18 months of complaints they have finally hit rock bottom at just over 1Mbps. Avonlinehave negotiated a discount with too-way as the provider has admitted that they are over subscribed - that says it all, really. It was suggested that I pay more for a business connection if I wanted to achieve the kind of service that I was promised when I signed up. I still retain this as a backup connection have a roof mounted 4g antenna and 4g router for my main broadband connection. It's worth noting that you do still get 18Mbps if you use this between 2am and 5am; just not when you are awake. Customer services were always polite but I've spent many hours talking to them and they finally admitted that it is a known problem with of subscribed bandwidth - don't expect it to be any different for you!

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Posted: 15th Sep, 2015    By: Mark Taylor
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I recently changed to Avonline (Avanti to be precise) and the system works really well (allowing for the satellite lag), the staff are UK based and friendly and seem technically competent but.....

and here is the major problem....

NOBODY ANSWERS THE PHONE!!!!

I must have called their tech support line a douzen times only to be told I am 'next in line' to be answered and 20 minutes later they still haven't answered the call, I e mail them and ask them to call me and nothing!

How can they run a tech business where they cant provide enough staff to speak to customers? It is utterly useless and puts their customer service performance on a par with E.on, EDF Energy or god help us BT.

What a shame.

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Posted: 28th Jul, 2015    By: LewisT1973
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As a starting note, I would like to say that this review is wholeheartedly the truth and does not deviate from the truth.

Avonline Broadband like to take your money and not give back what it is they are offering. They are happy to take a substantial amount of money for hardware when it leaves the warehouse covered in bird excrement, dents, scratches, paint markings and moss. could at least charge refurb price for kit that is supposed to be new?!

From a technical side of things 800ms of latency isn't really good for anything. Now I understand there is going to be latency - there will always be latency until we can warp travel like they do in those Star Trek films - and there is bound to be more over a satellite connection, but c'mon Avonline, don't lie to me and your customer base when you say we can use either satellite provider for working in a cloud environment or holding decent telephone calls over Internet Protocol. They suck on Avanti and are just plain annoying on a Tooway connection. Now I understand this may be useful for a residential home for making some phone calls, but for business users, nope. Would. Not. Go. There.

I do like the Avonline Website, and this whole 'Adam' thing that is going on. Maybe Adam is a cult leader or something that Avonline Broadband tries to look up at.

The gentleman than installed the hardware was a lovely bloke. I think his name was Conan or Kieran or something along those lines?! Anyway, he quickly assembled the dish and placed it up on the wall. I cannot help but think what he explains about the satellite connection is -and it's all good things before you go pointing fingers at staff members - scripted. He seems to struggle promoting the product and looks like he is just a slavery machine in the scheme of things much, much larger in scale. Nice bloke and a quick, clean installation. BONUS Avonline.

You're probably sick and tired of my sarcasm and negativity but everyone is unique right and entitled to their opinion, am I not wrong?

I would either like the speed that was advertised or my money back Avonline, before a strong legal case hits your desk.

Ta-ta for now! *blows kiss*

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