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Avanti Broadband as a supplier?

Have you had problems with Avanti satellite broadband?

  • Yes I have - am very dissatisfied with them

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Yes but they have sorted it quickly

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • No have been happy with their service

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    11
  • Poll closed .
Hi -- have not used one of these forums before but wanted to see if any other subscribers to Avanti satellite broadband around the country have experienced similarly shocking levels of customer service and response as we have in our village? Quick background: Hambleden cannot get conventional bband so has to use a satellite based solution. Avanti Communications Group plc provides that service. The system is down and Avanti will not get engineers to fix it for 5 full working days.
 
Northern Ireland Grump

Hi -- have not used one of these forums before but wanted to see if any other subscribers to Avanti satellite broadband around the country have experienced similarly shocking levels of customer service and response as we have in our village? Quick background: Hambleden cannot get conventional bband so has to use a satellite based solution. Avanti Communications Group plc provides that service. The system is down and Avanti will not get engineers to fix it for 5 full working days.

Avanti won a government contract to replace BT as satellite broadband providers to NI. Since there service went live on 1 April, the quality of my service has dropped significantly - breaks in transmission, slow download and upload speeds, dramatic cut in quality of images on web pages etc. Have complained by email and awaiting a reply promised within two business days.
 
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I got my "upgrade" from the BT satellite service to Avanti 2Mb pro service on Thursday.

It is rubbish! More often than not, the service has dropped and it takes 2-5 minutes to re-establish connection. Downloads are slow and forget about uploads. I tried unsuccessfully to contact Avanti all day Thursday - the helpdesk lines were constantly busy. And then they were off Friday through Tuesday for Easter - no support whatsoever. What am I paying for?

I have ran speed tests and once it reported 1Mb download speed, but only that once. I have had several readings less than 100k speed. And about half the tests don't even get past the latency test!

Has anyone else got Avanti replacement for the BT service? I would love to hear how you are getting on!

Angry!
 
I too have been switch over to Avanti Sat and my experiences to date are not good at all . I am on the 3 meg package and have to say that BT's 512k service was like fibre to the home compared to Avanti. I get very bad downloads and uploads as the other member in here has said uploads hardly worth talking about and forget about browsing . I have been on the phone to customer support now for the 2 weeks now I have had this service sometimes waiting in excess of 20 mins and been told that they would call me back with updates which hardly ever happened. I am now told that after two weeks that there is a problem with some of the customers in N.Ireland and that the engineers are working on it . I am awaiting on a call and will let you no what happens . Life would be so much easier with fixed line BB maybe someday.

Lep
 
Avanti experience in scotland

The service started fairly well, a few niggles but it was OK. UNTIL 9th February when a server crashed - downhill ever since!

Some websites refuse to load on what should be "broadband" - if I check on dial-up there is no problem with the sites it is purely an Avanti issue.

I believe they were approached by Moray Firth Radio - but were unable/unwilling to provide any sort of spokesman.

They had 1,000 customers here in Scotland (January) and it was working OK. They added another 500 (by April) and it is falling apart. There are another 2,000 to be added to this system that is not coping at present :eek:.

VoIP breaks up dreadfully, pages sometimes need to be refreshed after 5 minutes, some pages just do not loaded at all!

February - connection went down
March - email failed Friday to Monday
April - connection went down again

Oh and connection speed - lowest I have clocked so far is 23K - see the evidence at www.ambamail.com/~emhor (I had to use their webspace for something ;) )
 
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P.S. I am really struggling to load pages and post (Avanti) as one of my neighbours put it loading a page is a coffee break. Even then you might have to reload!
 
Yes another spanking new Avanti user grump.

Absolutely appalling browsing over the weekend. Unable to open complicated websites (tennis) and having to try at least twice for simple ones. Today (Monday) it is reasonable.

My question is to the other guys having problems. Which package have you bought?
I am on the cheapest (£23.50) but at least one of you is having problems even with the 3Mb option.

Incidentally if i go to Network and Sharing Centre (Vista) and click on View Status i always get a 100Mb speed! I don't understand that.

I couldn't send e-mails from Windows Mail (Vista equivalent of Outlook Express) so had to call up Avanti and after a 10 minute wait got hold of someone who could help. So apart from the actual working of the broadband itself my other gripe (minor in comparison) is the support. There are no Avanti web pages that help. Now i know the Outgoing SMTP is mail.ambamail.com i could Scroogle it.
and found this page
www.ruralwings-project.net/portal/s...ning-and-support-material/uk/welcome-pack.doc
which is actually an official Avanti official document and has everything that would have saved me major headaches over the weekend.
Why is this not on Avanti website! Sorry if it is but i could not find it!
 
I got in contact with our goverment here who awarded them the contract here in N.Ireland and they responded to me very quickly and got in contact with Avanti about these issues .

They are awaiting Avanti's responce so as soon as I here anything I will let you folks know.

I cancel my direct debit with them and just said that when you get things sorted you call me !

Ollie
 
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Are they Tiscalians?

That Italian primedilistir has got a lot to answer for. Or is it someone else who puts the snot in slime?

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/news/EkFukZEAAZkcmkwagV.html

Avanti to supply Northern Ireland satellite broadband
9:52 am - January 16th, 2009
Category: Broadband Availability, Broadband Fibre

Northern Ireland’s DETI have funded Avanti Communications to the tune of £1.1m to provide satellite broadband services to NI residents and businesses unable to access fixed line broadband.

The 5 year contract with BT to provide 100% coverage of 512k broadband is coming to an end in March 2009 and the Avanti contract will provide continuity of service to the ~800 users of BT’s satellite service. Seup fee for new connections is £75 and residential service costs £25/month. Existing BT customers will not have to pay the connection fee.

Avanti will be initially using rented satellite capacity pending launch of their Hylas platform later this year.

The DETI have a number of other initiatives underway, including a sub-loop unbundling trial (fibre to the cabinet or FTTC). It is good to see actual initiatives and money being deployed, rather than the English situation of press releases and talk.

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/n...northern-ireland-satellite-broadband-488.html

So now you know where all the merchant bankers retired to.
 
I contacted our goverment here in N.Ireland who awarded Avanti the contract and informed them about the terrible service from Avanti.

They contacted Avanti and are awaiting a responce from them. I will let you know what they come back with.

One pictular evening I was getting about 60-70kb download rate on my 3 meg package this should have been 3 times that . I call Avanti and one of their support agents told me that this is to be expected during busys time . I wish she should have said its busy all the time.

I really think Avanti have bit off more than they can chew . Maybe they are trying to make do until they get their new Sat up and running so hopefully sooner than later.

Ollie

PS This is the second time trying to post this on here ?
 
No he's not trying to hard, he just has Avanti. So the next page fails to load and you don't know if the message was sent or not.
 
I have Avanti Satellite broadband, the 512 K package, part of the Scottish government roll-out to rural areas. At busy times, response can be terrible. This is clearly because multiple users are sharing the bandwidth. Mostly I can't get anything worth having and just give up. However, as most of their users are business ones, download times are not bad for large single files during the evenings and weekends. Where it really slows down is with complicated web-pages with entries from different domain names on the same page. (Ebay, for instance does this a lot.), this is because of the long latency times; each different domain name has its own latency time. Even in the middle of the night, latency times are absurdly long. I have a 60 second time-out on both email and browser, and about half of all access attempts time out on the first try, but the second try is almost always successful; this points to one specific problem: DNS table access time.

Every ISP has to use a DNS table which converts the domain name part of a URL, (e.g. www.something.com), into an IP address, (e.g. 49.212.87.198). Generally the server will keep some routing information with the IP address to speed access. This table is really big, (think how many domain names there are on the planet), however most ISPs have a dedicated server, (or several), with lots of memory in it to manage these requests. This way the whole table stays in memory the whole time, and access is almost immediate. In the case of Avanti, either the DNS machine does not have enough memory, or they are using the same machine to do other tasks, and you have to wait for disk access to get to the right entry in the table. The answer is simple: a dedicated DNS machine with enough memory to hold the whole table. This is a relatively simple problem to solve: a little minor investment.

The busy times problem will only get worse, as the Irish and Scottish programmes are rolled out. Solving this problem depends on where the bottleneck is. I am rather afraid that it is in the satellite or its down-link to the earth-station. It may be that extra capacity is available on the satellite, and it is just a matter of Avanti paying for more bandwidth from the satellite owner. More likely, the bandwidth is all used up and Avanti are flying a kite, (i.e. selling something they don't actually have), and hoping that the problems will just go away, or that people will just accept them faute de mieux.

For me, at busy times I am better with dial-up; in the middle of the night, I now have access to streaming videos such as BBC, however I am still badly slowed down with complicated websites that use multiple domain names on the same page of information. Often you get small areas of the page with "unavailable" messages. The only saving is that this package is far cheaper than my phone bill for dial-up was.

John
 
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apologies but no improvement

Hi
I'm a NI Avanti customer and complained to them and DETI directly. DETI met them on 6 May and on 14 May I got two identical letters from Avanti apologising, promising an upgrade by end of May and waiving a month's bill. They were supposed to write to me about the bill but nothing ever came.
I've complained again. Odd things -when I check IP address it puts me (or is it Avanti) in Birr, Co. Offaly, Ireland?? Also got a message using IE that "the acceleration service could not connect with URL (google). I had previously phoned Avanti and asked them if they used acceleration software to achieve better speeds at the expense of signal quality and I got a categorica assurance they did no such thing. Do I believe them????? I dabble in photography and it seems avanti cut the file size of images on web pages by up to 90%, and even the text looks v grainy at times. I never thought I would thank BT, but their service was a lot better than Avanti who have obviously sweet-talked DETI into funding a service which at most times is worse than dial-up.
Can we spread the word through Avanti users and get some real pressure on DETI to bring their supplier up to scratch. Even for nothing per month, this service would be crap.
 
Hi
I'm a NI Avanti customer and complained to them and DETI directly. DETI met them on 6 May and on 14 May I got two identical letters from Avanti apologising, promising an upgrade by end of May and waiving a month's bill. They were supposed to write to me about the bill but nothing ever came.
I've complained again. Odd things -when I check IP address it puts me (or is it Avanti) in Birr, Co. Offaly, Ireland?? Also got a message using IE that "the acceleration service could not connect with URL (google). I had previously phoned Avanti and asked them if they used acceleration software to achieve better speeds at the expense of signal quality and I got a categorica assurance they did no such thing. Do I believe them????? I dabble in photography and it seems avanti cut the file size of images on web pages by up to 90%, and even the text looks v grainy at times. I never thought I would thank BT, but their service was a lot better than Avanti who have obviously sweet-talked DETI into funding a service which at most times is worse than dial-up.
Can we spread the word through Avanti users and get some real pressure on DETI to bring their supplier up to scratch. Even for nothing per month, this service would be crap.

You have a few interesting points there espically the one regarding the picture sizes . Avanti are crap no word for it BT was lightning and they even supported p2p not like Avanti there is so much restrictsions on there service .

I am going to wait until this network upgrade they are all talking about before the end of May before I contact DETI again . You would think they would have done all this upgrading before taking on new customers.

WE NEED REAL BROADBAND DETI !!!!!

Ollie
 
For me, at busy times I am better with dial-up; in the middle of the night, I now have access to streaming videos such as BBC, however I am still badly slowed down with complicated websites that use multiple domain names on the same page of information. Often you get small areas of the page with "unavailable" messages. The only saving is that this package is far cheaper than my phone bill for dial-up was.

John

Thanks for the techy explanation of why my girlfriend had a hard time getting tennis websites, maybe someday i will understand it. Their explanation for slow page opening (given by the technician who rigged us up) was in the time taken for the signal to reach the satellite and back. But over the phone with the receptionist and one of their web-pages they admit it is to do with how many users are on line (read the fine-print is the message i guess. but when you have no choice what's the point).
Our service is a lot faster that when we first signed up about a month ago. We rarely get the error opening pages and usually tennis pages open OK too. Yes the lack of P2P support is a drag. But don't see how it can be cheaper than the anytime dial-up offered by BT (that was a little over half the price).
 
Never thought I would say BT Sat was good.

Moved to Avanti on the 1st June on the 1mb download service. It has never risen above 0.2mb download with aditional pages not loading. BT where really better than this. Mike
 
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