ISP Reviews by psimanc

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.