Anyone have satellite broadband?

[crappyday]

Not the sky kind that actually comes down the phone line but the actual satellite kind.
We are never going to get super fast broadband, and I'm GettingTired of buffering every time I want to watch iplayer.
If we lived 1/2 a mile up the road we could have fibre optic BT but sadly they're to coming down this far (like the gas, and the drains)
So I'm starting to consider other options.
So- if you have satellite broadband- which one?
How much?
Is it any good?
TIA

NOT coming this far. Stupid phone.
(Let's not talk about the mobile reception )

I know someone who has if. It is not as good as billed. Suffers badly from over usage at peek time. Peek seems to be 6pm onwards UK time, especially bad come 9/10pm.
Expensive, data limits, long lock in period (couple of years I think).
Long ping, so not good for streaming, games, etc. Ok for downloading and watching later.

I think there is only one provider, so all are resellers. Satellite I think is owned and run from a place in Italy.

Have you found different satelite owners, or just companies selling bandwidth?

There are different satellites. They use Tooway, so I would avoid that. No idea what the other ones are like.

www.europasat.com/product-chooser/compare-networks/

Fairly sure there are 2 maybe 3 firms (and several resellers).

It is as Cindy34 said, with generally high cost, low(ish) data limits, long contract and often a high (1K) setup cost.

No way (short of being a millionaire) that you could compare with landline (my 10 Mbps cheap ADSL from Plus.Net has been providing 300 GB of data a month - two households, plenty of iPlayer, ITV player, 4oD, TWiT.tv, etc and movies from NowTV or box sets (I caught up on 6 years of '24' over about 6 weekends!)

I would look more seriously at moving, before every home with poor broadband speeds is ignored by buyers. Rightmove and others are starting to put speed test information on, and many households, whether they have teens or younger, or someone near the top in their business, will want a rural retreat but one with fast broadband. I see the 'blighted homes' being those with few options and speeds below 5 Mbps in 2-3 years.

Sorry, just that one of my friends installs home audio/video (where every room has a a really big TV (50" plus, starting at £4000), streams video from their own server, with speakers and internet streamed music , etc. etc.

The people who pay for his services tend to pop a couple of million pounds into a remote farmhouse conversion so they have a lovely property with big grounds and within 40 miles of Manchester/ Liverpool etc, but then find well after everything is being worked on (new floors, etc, etc) that the internet lets them down. Have been to a few properties on the Cheshire Plains where there's abysmal internet speeds, and then complaints when clicking to start streaming takes about 10 seconds (from the satellite) as the customer has previously been using a phone line/ Virgin Media cable and the delay is maybe 1-3 seconds (so when it takes 10 seconds they are wondering 'is it working').

Thanks.
Moving not really an option- we love living here!
I just know that the broadband is never really going to be fast, and not fibre so started thinking about options.

How about multiple ADSL lines? Have a new phone line put in, have broadband on it, then link it with your existing network using a load balanced router. It would not increase your speed as such but would let multiple devices used at the same time get better speed as instead of sharing one line, they share two.

Why do you need more speed? Is there a specific thing you want to be able to do?

What speed does your current ADSL connect at to the exchange? Look in router config settings for the download connection details.

You say Fibre is coming but not as far as you, how do you know that? Depending on the speed of your current ADSL, a bad connection to the FTTC box half a mile away may still be better speed. Would need to look at cost though as many providers charge a price for FTTC which does not vary much on line speed.

BT are the company bringing fibre to our area, and they've confirmed that we won't get it. They've done a special thing with the county council to improve fibre coverage but that website also confirms they are not bringing it to us.
They will 'improve speeds if possible' by the end if 2016.
I want to be able to live stream films without waiting for several minutes at a time in the middle as if buffers. And I want it to not go so slowly in the evenings that I can't watch iplayer at all. Not big things!

Alas the latency on satellite links means that buffering still happens at times on live streaming.

Multiple ADSL lines is all I can think of which may work, as the PING on that is usually quite low, so data packets are likely to arrive in the right order.

Unless you have lots of money to burn, I would let someone else in your area experiment with satellite broadband and if they get it working well, then you copy their setup.

Article about latency. aa.net.uk/kb-broadband-latency.html

Multiple ADSL won't improve streaming of a single iPlayer programme unless you have some specialist network kit both at home and at a data centre somewhere. Even then it won't work well for load-balancing.

It might be worth looking into if there's the possibility of using a Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) Internet Service Provider. They use special long-distance wireless kit to deliver WiFi to an antenna on your home that you then connect to a standard wireless router.

There's a company we use at work called Skyline Networks that can do this; we use them for connecting offices together but I know they can also provide Internet access. Skyline might be a bit business-oriented (and, hence, expensive) for home use but there are a number of other companies offering similar technology.

On the other hand, depending on where you are, there may be wireless options... linking to someone else who does have a reasonable speed, for example...