Freedomsat Reviews

[pending approval]

I have been a Bentley Walker customer since the new Tooway service has been available. Due to living in a rural location and exhausting the ADSL options in my area, I had no choice but to try satellite broadband.

The Tooway service is overall as expected, the speed is good and the monthly download allowance is fair for what you pay for. Certain applications have limited functionality such as Skype/VoIP due to the latency…but this was expected after researching the product & technology…. A slight delay is nothing to fret about.

Installation was top class and installed within a few days of purchase, the dish is 72cm’s and was placed on the southern side of my property…. No complaints!

A work requirement meant I have to connect to my office via a VPN (IP SEC)…this caused issues at first due to the latency, however the technical support team worked with my company, and a change to an SSL VPN solved the problems I’ve been having.

Overall very happy with the service, and as long as you do not expect a miracle in the middle of nowhere… Bentley Walker Tooway service would be your best solution for rural broadband.

We were a growing internet retailer operating out of a VERY rural location. We’d pushed our BT lines (via a bonded solution) as far as we could. And this still left us at the mercy of a farmer digging up the cables, so we initially needed a failover solution, hence Bentley Walker.

They offered reasonable rates, good speed and were able to offer support for installation. This proved trickier than we first thought as working out of a converted barn the walls were not strong enough to hold up the satellite dish. Bentley Walker & their contractor were able to arrange for us to have a specific bracket made to hold the dish up. Then after a bit of IP address fun we were away.

As continued growth put increased demands on our broadband, we ended up using the satellite solution on a 50/50 split with our landlines. This worked just fine and even allowed us to survive a couple of periods of outage during the snow and rain.

We only stopped using the service because we’ve relocated to a better connected business park.

As I work from home and I'm in a rural location with a poor broadband service, I decided to go with satellite to gain reliability and speed. I went with Tooway simply because it's the only one available in the area - and it's been a huge disappointment. Everything except simply downloading a file is actually slower than our slow ASDL broadband - and, despite choosing the second biggest package (around £50 a month), in the first month we were throttled back (although we don't download music, play games, etc.) and the speed then became absolutely unmanageable.

Despite there being no contention (because you’ve effectively got your own dedicated broadband), we’ve been experiencing just the same slow-downs at peak times and general rises and falls in speed as we did with ADSL and a normal broadband provider.

Also, femtocells can't work with satellite broadband (which we were not told during the original assessment), which means we now have no mobile phone coverage into the bargain.

Bentley Walker, the company providing the broadband, are not geared up for the domestic consumer. Basically, everything is up to you: to find out what to do if there's a problem, to work out how to get in touch with each department (one minute you need to deal with Technical Support, the next minute it might be Accounts - each part of a problem has to be dealt with by a different department and you have to sort this out yourself). The 'portal' (which you only find out about and to which you're given access only when there's a problem) is not user friendly (to put it mildly). Basically, you're on your own.

Unless you're on a slow dial-up line, this is simply not something you want to saddle yourself with - avoid if you have any other option (e.g. joining two fixed lines).

I'm a rural homeworker on Anglesey who was getting less than 0.125mps from BT Broadband and so I took advantage of the Welsh Assembly's Broadband Support scheme which covers the installation costs up to £1,000 for an alternative broadband service. I was going to go with eXwavia's wireless service but at the time they were unable to get a signal to my property (subsequently they confirmed they could now do this).

Installation was performed by a sub-contractor in September 2011 who ignored my recommendations that due to the high winds we experience that a side mounted installation would be prone to movement. It lasted 3 days before they had to come back a remount it in its current position on the gable end which is still working well. BW don't offer a wireless modem so I bought a Belkin router which was straightforward to install and seems to work well.

I went for the 8 Mps Tooway system which seems to provide the download and upload speeds promised though of course there is the issue of latency which takes a bit of getting used to and surfing the web is noticeably slower in the afternoons and evenings (UK time) but I'm not sure if that's an issue with the Tooway service or just the impact of general traffic on the net.

The service seems to be pretty stable even in pretty bad weather and I've only experienced a couple of what I suspect were weather related service issues. Access to my company's VPN via SSL connection, although stable is very, very slow and frankly doesn't seem much faster than the old 0.125 Mbs BT broadband. BW did advise me that although VPN would be supported quote "it just may run a bit slow because of latency" but to be honest if I'd known it would be this slow I wouldn't have gone with Tooway.

BW monthly subscription costs were the lowest of the Tooway suppliers I checked and their hardware installation costs have come down to £99 for an 18 month contract (the Welsh assembly grant covers installation costs but not monthly subscription costs) although at early £37 per month for 8 Mbs its still much more expensive than land-line based broadband but then if you live close enough an exchange to get a decent speed you wouldn't need satellite broadband!

BW support uses an on-line ticket system which I find a bit frustrating but generally they are reasonably quick to respond with accurate solutions, though they are being noticeable quiet on the VPN speed issue.

BW have now installed UK ISP addresses and a usage website and so far have been providing free increases to monthly download quotas although as I'm not a heavy user I haven't been up to my standard monthly limit.