hiya all, a question to anyone who has got it.
does anyone have satalite broadband is it cheap because i can only find very expensive!

Yeh its pretty expensive, prohibitively expensive for most last time I looked. Like most things it will come down in price, I gather it don't like bad weather too.

Though there seems to be things happening

A French firm plans to launch a satellite next year that it says will offer the entire UK up to 10Mbit/s broadband, including rural areas that are poorly served by ADSL and cable.

This week, Eutelsat is launching "Tooway" broadband in the UK at up to 2Mbit/s, via an existing satellite.


Its new craft, launching in the third quarter of 2010, will use the Ka band of the microwave spectrum to deliver speeds close to those typically offered by the ADSL2+ equipment currently being installed in local exchanges by BT. Eutelsat's current service uses the lower frequency Ku band.

The new satellite will cover the whole continent, from Turkey in the east to Ireland in the west.

As now, consumers will require a dish and transmitter to receive and send data. According to Eutelsat's business development manager, Jean-Francois Fremaux, the equipment will cost about £400. The monthly subscription for the new service will be similar to the £29.99 tariff for the existing package.

Eutelsat said that it will offer latency-sensitive services such as IPTV and VoIP via satellite. Fremaux conceded that the updated technology will not overcome latency problems for online gamers, however.

The firm is currently pitching its broadband packages at rural consumers, amid negotiations between government and mobile operators to deliver universal 2Mbit/s broadband. "Tooway™ is able to offer true broadband access with total independence from existing infrastructures. It has the technology and capacity to become the definitive, low-cost solution for geographical areas that are affected by the digital divide," it said.

Tooway packages are being sold by a network of local distributors certified to carry out the dish installation. There's more details here


I just learned how to add links

I used it a good few years ago, it was around the time when they were starting to roll out ADSL in the UK.

It was excellent for downloading large files how ever the latency caused it to be really slow when browsing the net or when gaming.

Things may have changed technology wise but i'm not sure if they have solved the problem of space being so far away

Purely out of interest how come you want satellite broadband? In a pretty rural area I assume?

It's useless for gaming, VoIP or anything that's dependent on PING time.

Satellite b/band can be quite fast on the download, but your upload speed is all dependent on your telephone line still, as the dish is used for downloading, and the telephone line is your upload connection.

Obviously this also means that all your requests have to go from your PC, down the telephone line to the ISP's centre to be processed, and then your return packets will be sent from the ISP to their uplink station to the satellite in Earth orbit, and then back down to you on the ground.

This takes quite some time.

I cannot get Broadband where I live, and have explored the Satellite option; you are correct, it is indeed prohibitively expensive. For me, the only workable and useful option has been G3 Mobile Broadband. I am not able to gte it at home (no cover), but can at my nearest supermarket, which is where I'm sat now, watching TV clips and god knows what as well as posting this. Its not ideal, but it is better than dial-up!