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).