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help with satellite internet providers

Hi
I have just found the group whilst searching for a review on SkyDSL, I wonder if anyone would be able to offer me any help. I have a place in Spain in the centre of the country but I do not have a telephone line, my electricity is provided by solar panels but I have plenty and am able to have the use of my laptop whilst I stay here. I currently use the WIFI from the local village but the strength of the signal though good is not good enough to be able to watch television over my laptop and I would really like to be able to do this. there are a number of different companies who say they will provide a signal strong enough for this but does anyone on this forum use one or know of any good ones? as the stuff I have read so far is very confusing,

I am no computer genius I'm afraid, I know enough to get by and have been able to install my own television satellite dish so I think maybe I could at a push install one myself (fingers crossed :confused:) as I am far inland and we don't have very many english speaking professionals here. I don't exactly know how strong a signal I would require it would be for emails, a couple of hours of television a night, and general surfing. I don't download things other than the occasional programme for something I may need on the laptop for example virus checker programmes and the occasional photos that my family post me.

these are the companies I know of who operate in spain
SkyDSL
MICRONET BROADBAND for TOOWAY
europsat including TOOWAY - SES - AVANTI

has anyone any experience of these companies I would be so grateful if anyone can point me in the right direction,
thanks so much for your help,

Antonio
 
My experience with a few providers in the UK is "don't do it"!
Your time is probably better spent putting a substantial aerial up to get better reception on the service provider in the nearby village.

Otherwise tooway is the best of a bad bunch from the use I've had on sat providers.

Tom - www.mouselike.org
 
If you can get 4G then use that instead - same price about £50 a month but much better ping time and speeds.
 
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Satellite is a last resort.

The performance of the wireless connection will depend on the quality of the service being provided, which includes how contended it is (e.g. how many are using it), and the signal strength.

If the service is over-contended then it doesn't matter so much how good the signal is, it may never provide as much bandwidth as you need.

You'd see this if the speed you get wanders up and down a lot and is worse at the sort of times when people want to watch TV, for example.

If the speed is consistently poor, and you can see that the signal is weak on your kit, then investing in a good quality antenna will help with that.

If you can see the transmitter from where you are then a directional antenna will be the way to go, mounted as high as possible pointing directly at the transmitter.

In the UK it's normal for wireless broadband providers to supply the antenna and usually to come to your property and mount and optimise it rather than you do it yourself. However perhaps it's different in Spain and you might be able to seek out someone with some specialised knowledge who can help you.

If a DSL service is available over the phone line then that may be a better option, depending on how long the phone line is, and what sort of condition it is in. Once a phone line is over about 2500m long the performance begins to drop sharply and by the time it's about 3500m long the performance is hit and miss, longer than that and it may not provide what you need. Are you able to ask the potential providers what sort of speed that's likely to deliver?

For TV you need 2 Meg downstream for "standard definition" and about 6 Meg down for higher definition.

Satellite remains an option, and, actually, for streaming, it will be fine because the curse of satellite - latency - doesn't impact that as much as say browsing or VOIP. What matters is that the speed is consistent for as long as it is streaming and this lack of consistency of performance is where satellite suffers particularly badly.
 
Satellite speeds during the most contended times on tooway tend to only be around 6mbps. Furthermore, while the downloads limits, on the surface, look fairly generous they'll begin to throttle you by the time you've consumed about 30% of your data. At times of high congestion, the throttles will potentially hit you very hard, with the most limited throughput being 64kbps, dialup.

Standard definition H264 video VBR ALL-I can cope on around 0.8mbps, with HD requiring anywhere from 2-6 depending on how blocky you want the picture to be!

I've heard xDSL to be very intermittent in spain, with frequent very long line lengths. I've heard businesses often resort to satellite.
 
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I have used Quantis for a while, but after we moved, we ordered Europasat. To my surprise there are a few "hidden" limitations with Europasat, more than it was with quantum. From 11-12 in the "free zone" there are times when nothing works. Torrents are limited to about 10k, and sometimes ftp download is extremely slow. Than later in the night the download picks up to fairly good speeds.
Stay away from Skydsl(.eu). We ordered a package from them, with the supposed 30 days money back guarantee they have it on the website, and wanted to test out their "no fair usage policy". Soon we hit some "magical" limitations because the internet was going unbearably slow for hours. We contacted them about the issue, and were told that we downloaded to much ?!? I understand that there are using a shared system and if other people are on the line, than my share would be less but it was not the case we were throttled to 0.1kb for hours. When we asked to change the account to the smallest one, because this is not even close to "no fair usage policy", and than we were told to pay the activation fee AGAIN if we want that. So we give up on them.
 
oh and basically almost every company that sells "Satellite broadband internet" in Spain is s selling the same Tooway packages that are currently 10/25/100*gb of traffic. The 100gb comes with a star: only the web browsing and internet is the high speed, if you start downloading for example your speed with ftp for example will be cut after hitting 35gb (at least this is what I read on a few of the service providers). So it doesn't really matter from who you get it, you will not see any other packages unless "almighty" tooway decides to change it.

So get the cheapest one, the product will be the same. Customer service is almost close to non existent to any of them, it's troublesome to call Quantis for example you have to wait a lot before you are connected.
 
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