Tooway Satellite Broadband - fast Internet finally?

This seems like a wierd topic to start my blogging escapades with, but nonetheless an interesting one.  

Living in a rural(ish) area I've been besieged with awful broadband for a number of years now.  Despite being in the centre of a popular village, the best I've ever been able to expect is about 2.3Mbps download with 448Kbps upstream being optimistic at the best of times.  I'll save my ranting about a two stage UK Broadband economy for another post, as frankly, life's too short to spend endless hours worrying about BT's ineptitude and inability to deliver services to anywhere that's not vaguely urban.  

I was quite excited when some recent Google searching revealed the existance of Tooway.  I've known about satellite based broadband services for some time now and always associated them with a high latency, backhaul via an analogue line, service of last resort type of connectivity used by those stuck halfway up a Welsh mountain with no prospect of DSL sync in a million years.  When I saw 10Mbps download and up to 4Mbps upload I knew it warranted further investigation.

Some frenetic browsing activity proceeded and I discovered that the launch date was around 31st May and that distribution was being provided by (among others) Avonline who I've dealt with before for satellite services.  (http://www.tooway-direct.co.uk)  a quick call to a very knowledgeable guy (called Basil, but we won't hold that against him!) convinced me to give this whole thing a try.

For interest, I work from home, providing IT support and other online services, so getting decent connectivity is fairly paramount to me.  I've opted for the 10+ service which at £99.00 a month may well put others off - there are however a range of options which are significantly less costly with some slower speeds and lower bandwidth caps.  

So here I am, about six weeks later, blogging to you via the service.  There were some initial provisioning delays as I think I've not been the only one to show some interest in the service so the launch was put back to about June 15th and it's taken a couple of weeks to get the hardware.  I was kept informed so no great shakes.

I opted for self install, which for some maybe a very brave option - not quite fully there yet as the supplied wall bracket only catered for a wall facing the direction of the satellite and not one perpendicular to it - again, easily sorted by Avonline who are sending me one suited to the job.  

The dish itself is a 78cm slightly concentric design, and some may find the neighbours aren't too impressed.  It's a lot larger than your standard Sky dish and being white is a little more obtrusive in most environments.  The LNB on the end is something to behold, looking like the sort of thing that would befit Goonhilly Earth Station rather than your average 3 bed semi and the whole thing weighs a ton.  The LNB, which Tooway call a TRIA is about 5-6Kg and when coupled with the industrial strength mounting kit will require a very sturdy mount to ensure reliable operation.  That being said, I've got mine temporarily mocked up on a small aluminium tripod designed for use with caravans and motorhomes and it's working nicely at ground level.  This also impressed me somewhat, as the thought of being able to have this kind of access pretty much anywhere in Western Europe with half an hour of setup time was very appealing (now I just need the motorhome).

Install was relatively straightforward - required components were almost all provided, with the exception of 1 x stepfather with drill and ladder for aborted wall mounting attempt and 1 x concerned girlfriend ensuring I didn't do anything too stressful having helpfully decided to undertake the installation a couple of hours after oral surgery....

The dish takes about 45 minutes to put together, and you'll need a Pozi screwdriver and a 13mm spanner, or ideally socket and ratchet.  Sadly, I didn't take photos all the way through the process, but you get a poster like this one which shows you how to put it all together - think Ikea bookcase on steroids . .. . . .

Dish install poster, "á la Ikea"

Once it's all together, you get the interesting task of trying to find where to point it.  The service is provided via Eutelsat's KA-SAT which is located at 9 degrees East.  (http://www.eutelsat.com/satellites/9e_ka-sat.html for the geeks that want to know) and has a pretty small beam size so this was going to be no mean feat.  I wish I'd done some video of Charles' and my first attempt using a fence post strapped to my garden bench.  It clearly wasn't going to happen, and yesterday was blowing about Force 5 which made things even more interesting......

I found a couple of really useful tools to aid with positioning.  The first is provided by Tooway and is a GMaps overlay to get the right azimuth and declination angles based on your address or GPS co-ordinates - http://finder.tooway-online.com - this will tell you the bearing you need to point at and the angle of elevation you need to set the dish to.

The next two are iPhone tools which helped massively.  The first is DishPointer.com's Augmented Reality tool for iPhone (DP AR Pro) which gives you the bearing and elevation figures (you use the ones from the Tooway finder app to line up) and then handily shows you where in the sky to point at - taping your iPhone to the end of the TRIA device gives you a good first indication of where to go:

Dishpointer.com's really helpful AR App

The other app which was massively beneficial was the plaincode.com Clinometer app - held against the back of the dish mount it provides a very accurate elevation setting which was enough to find the heartbeat beacon to allow for setup.

Accurate angles from the Clinometer app

Tooway helpfully provide some videos on YouTube (search for Tooway Install) which shows you how to proceed from here - the TRIA device has a sounder built into it, which indicates signal strength.  When connected to a satellite modem placed into install mode it beeps when it finds the heartbeat from the KA-SAT service and works rather like a metal detector - as you get closer the beeps get higher and faster until you eventually get a static tone to indicate a signal lock.  This took me a while, and required the removal of several objects from in the way (Charles, his van, several cats etc) but was quite simple to achieve.  Once that was done, I locked off the bolts on the dish, clicked next, waited a few minutes et Voilà, I got an IP address from the service.  A quick call to Avonline got me activated and we're ready to go.

I'll do the proper install on the wall when I get the new bracket, but suffice to say, I'm suitably impressed.  There's still the usual latency which you'd expect from a satellite service, but you're bouncing the signal about 30,000 miles there and back so it's somewhat unavoidable but I'm getting over 11Mbps download and about 2.8 upload - a massive improvement on the my BT provided services.

Right, I'm off to do other things now as "the other half" has just awoken from her slumber and I'm very concerned she's been barbecuing in her sleep - how can your hair smell of smoky BBQ by any other method. . . .Enjoy the photos below of the install.  If anyone would like some help installing this then please drop me a mail at will.kennedy@netvector.co.uk 

Temporary install on handy Motor Home stand 

 Alignment surfaces on back - place your iPhone here!

 The TRIA or "LNB from Hell"

A not very sexy Skylogic satellite modem!