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Skerries
27-Jun-07, 12:05
Does anyone know a good supplier of broadband in Caithness via satellite dish? My friend is moving house and looking for advice.

EDDIE
27-Jun-07, 18:12
Does anyone know a good supplier of broadband in Caithness via satellite dish? My friend is moving house and looking for advice.
Well bt broadband does that vision box so u get all your tv via broadband and you can ditch the satelite dish is worth a look

Metalattakk
27-Jun-07, 18:35
Does anyone know a good supplier of broadband in Caithness via satellite dish? My friend is moving house and looking for advice.


Aye, you can get Satellite Broadband through a company such as AVC Broadband - http://www.avcbroadband.com/ - but the pricing is very steep. Monthly contract runs at £60, and the installation charges are astronomical too, although I think you can get a grant from CASE (or whatever they are calling themselves now) to help pay the first £1000 of the installation costs.

At the end of the day though, there are various problems with satellite broadband, namely speed issues. There is a lot of latency involved (well, think about it - the data has to be sent to a satellite, and back to earth again, so there will always be a measurable delay). Online gaming is impossible due to this latency.

For downloads though, speeds can be good, as a second or two delay between each packet sent means nothing.

However, that's all on a two-way satellite system - where the upload and download is done by satellite.

If you can get a one-way system where the uploading is done by a dial-up connection and downloading through the satellite dish, then things can almost be as fast as normal broadband.

And unfortunately, the standard SKY dish won't handle any of this.

engiebenjy
28-Jun-07, 00:48
I had a quick squint at the website. Now, before anyone starts, I know it is completely different to your usual broadband, but wow - i'll never moan about the price of mine again!!!!

gollach
28-Jun-07, 07:44
When I worked in the central belt, I investigated this for my office. In the end it was a man from Scottish Entrprise who convinced me that Scotland is too far north to consider installing satellite broadband. The connection is not reliable at this latitude apparantly.

NickInTheNorth
28-Jun-07, 08:53
I was involved in setting up some small satellite broadband systems in the Small Isles, and have to say that I found the service excellent. The latency was nothing like as bad as the doom and gloom merchants had us believe beforehand.

Probably not good for online gaming, but never had any problems with using skype, or ftp, or msn or various other technologies we were told would be impossible.

As far as I remember the latency is about 0.4 seconds for the 44,000km round trip to the satellite and back to earth.

Unfortunately the provider that was involved when I was has gone bust, so I can't make any personal recommendations as to who to use. But on the whole my personal experience of satellite broadband was very good.

exothermic
28-Jun-07, 09:45
We had BT Broadband/ADSL (I know its not satellite) until they broke it and refused to repair it (but that's another story and argument..don't get me started) so we had to look at satellite as a permanent solution.

We went with Avonline Broadband (www.avonlinebroadband.co.uk) as technically they seem very competant. Yes, my goodness the installation is expensive, but they do at least give you all the charges up front on their web site.

The installation man was here for 10 hours approx until it was working properly, without a word of complaint. Not his fault, had to get the chain saw out for the trees!

How much you are willing to pay for installation (don't hold your breath for a grant) and how much you are willing to pay monthly is all a question of why you need it!

Best of luck to your friend !

Skerries
28-Jun-07, 11:54
Thanks for your help everyone. With things like this it's quite hard to know what to do unless you have first-hand experience. I'll pass this information on! :)