No, no, and no.
We took out a Nordnet subscription when we first moved into our current home, there being no DSL at the time. Kept it for 2 years, during which time, I must have rung the tech support at least once a month to complain.
The problems are multiple:
the peak bandwidth is just that, and rarely lasts more than a few minutes - if you need sustained high bandwidth, e. g. for backups, synchronisation with outside storage, even operating system update downloads, etc, then you can forget it, it simply isn’t reliable enough ;
during the evenings, weekends and school holidays, the contention rate increases to a point where you’re inevitably disconnected at some stage, and it will be hard to find actual information as to what contention rates are for your area;
connection is weather dependent - snow, thunderstorm, heavy rain, all interfere with signal quality and transmission/reception.
If work is prepared to fork out the costs and running of a business subscription, you may get better service overall, but the price difference between consumer and pro subscriptions is fairly significant as I recall.
I wouldn’t go near satellite internet ever again unless I had no other choice.
Downloads that initiate multiple parallel connections to the remote server in order to spread the load on the provider’s equipment are more likely to fail - distributed computing service is not one of Nordnet’s strongpoints, certainly not for the consumer subscription packages, and there was a data cap per month, which takes into account both up and down loaded data.
I think your first post about the practical experience of using the system is invaluable as the service looks quite good in theory on paper but I’m at a bit of a loss as to why multiple connections to the same provider should fail (unless actively blocked, which is possible). Whether 1 individual stream or 10 it should all just be packets to the satellite link.
My experience with the old service was that even the handset combo they offered through their router suffered from both noise on the line and terrible lag.
They detect how many outgoing connections you’re making and throttle the bandwidth as a result, and occasionally put you on their naughty list as a result. All in their T&Cs too.
That’s just anti-social, it really makes no difference if you have one stream at 10mbps or 10 at 1mbps.
As I said in my first post on this thread, satellite broadband is not as awful as it used to be but it sounds as though using it only if no other option is available remains the correct advice.
Another thing I discovered and found to be totally useless. They encourage subscribers to use their night-time connections (12-6) for high data throughput applications. What they didn’t say at the time is that the connections available are rate limited. I gave up on the number of times I tried to program a remote backup to work from midnight (or just after), only to watch it fail 2/3 way through because the “free use” period had run out.
We kept our satellite subscription even when we got an ADSL service from Orange several years ago, because we didn’t trust the ADSL to work. However, the poor ADSL turned out to be better, at 2-4Mb/s, than the satellite which is currently billed as “22 Mb/s en réception et 6 Mb/s en émission” and which gives us apparently "trafic priorisé 0 à 50 Giga et “trafic standard” over 50Gb. I believe the satellite connection has a complicated mechanism that rachets down the débit depending on how much and when you are using it, and how others are using it. It varies a lot depending on time of day and weather. A quick check just now gives me 1.8Mb/s. You can buy extra Gb of course, for a price. And, wow, it’s free between 1am and 6am. We have obviously considered cancelling the satellite. It’s useful as a backup if other services fail. When fibre arrives (poss this year) we’ll get rid of it.
In fact we have had to fall back on it for the last 4 weeks while we have waited for Orange to come and reconnect us to their network. After many calls to the annoying brick wall computer which is Orange support, being told repeatedly to “verifier les branchements”, much frustration, a breakthrough chat on the internet to Bella, a real person who diagnosed that the lines were crossed, various calls from engineers who said the box was synchronised, a number of SMSs from Orange telling us it was all working correctly, and a desolate Livebox that seemed to have taken on a new identity and was unable for 4 weeks to detect the network… a subcontractor came yesterday, before 8am - I welcomed him at the gate, horror of horrors, still in my pyjamas and bare feet. He was scathing about Orange cutting costs, staff and services. He explained about the broken cable, not properly repaired, lines broken/crossed, no equipment in the local repartiteur to help trace broken lines. He had made sure to check the whole line from the repartiteur and reconnected us. Yippee! Now the Livebox has its old name, login and parameters. He left a card so we can give his company a score, saying that everyone rates them highly, and gives Orange a big zero! Still, we got used to the very slow ping and have been grateful for the satellite.
Hmmm, yes - I just noticed this in the info " Internet illimité + 150 Go priorisés
chaque mois".
So, not really unlimited as presumably in lieu of a data cap your connection effectively slows down after the first 150GB, possibly to unusable levels if Alex’s experience is anything to go by.
It’s fairly generous for satellite but still more mobile phone amounts of data than landline (I’m at about 1Tb per month)
I use a small business/techy-oriented ISP called Andrews&Arnold, run by a guy I knew vaguely at Uni (that’s not the reason I chose them as an ISP).
I have a 5TB allowance but half of anything unused at the end of the month is credited, so I start most months with 9TB
A lot of it is streaming video - Amazon Prime, iPlayer and C4 being the main culprits. Also if N°1 son updates a big game that can be >100GB these days, plus online learning when the kids were off school which basically meant he was video conferencing from 9-3:30 more-or-less continuously as well as remote working for my wife most days of the week and me one day a week.
Peaks were last April at 1.5TB and December with 1.33TB
Gary. Thanks for your post, very interesting, so I looked at what they are offering. Good point seems the promotional offers, but I became suspicious when seeing you needed to sign up really fast So to find out why I trawled through their small print and it looks like the normal smoke and mirrors brigade are at work
(I hope this is accurate - if not “sorry Nordnet”)
SPEED: 150mbps download? Nope! They employ traffic management meaning they can pretty much provide whatever they want. And if you need to upload it’s just 5mbps!
CAPACITY:
Unlimited? Nope, well, not really. OK if you browse/stream between 0100-0600hrs but after that, reach 150GB in any month and they’ll slow you down.
LATENCY:
Good? Nope. They say it’s good but then don’t declare the delay; but do go on to add it’s useless for gaming - so no change from the good old days.
WEATHER:
No problem? Nope. They state it’s not an issue yet then add it may be and recommend you “phone” their customer services to find the problem. Bit difficult if they also provide your phone line.
INSTALL COST:
WOW!! After intro offer, normal price of the kit for home assembly is a hefty 300€ . Add another 300€ and they’ll do it for you and if you don’t take it I have a feeling they’d just blame you every time you had a problem. Am I a cynic? Is it that obvious? (But I am in my 35th year of working in telecoms).
RENTAL:
Start before end April and it’s 40€ for the contract period. Wait until, later and it’s 60€
So what do I think? Fixed line or Mobile is still the best. This another Sat offer and I’d wait for other’s to try it before taking a costly leap of faith. Adding an antenna to a reasonable 4G router is a much cheaper solution/gamble and it’s what Bouygues provided “free” up to the end of March with their unlimited 4Gbox offer. I have been told that 4G providers of unlimited services also lower speed after your first 100GB yet they don’t charge 600€ up front.
Having said all that I am really pleased someone is attacking the comfy status quo of the existing telco’s, just a shame it’s an existing provider. Maybe “Tesla Comms” will be the disrupter we’re all waiting for? Especially if you live in a fibreless remote location.
Splitting hairs (and so they can claim they don’t slow people down) they cease to prioritise your traffic - so theoretically, if the network was lightly loaded, you could still see full speed.
The practical effect is probably the same.
As I said it’s 250ms minimum each way - physics and all that means a round trip to and from geostationary orbit is 240ms unless you know a way to get light to travel faster, so a round trip across the internet (from the request leaving your computer to the remote server to getting the reply back) is 500ms - TCP/IP - the main internet protocol used for web access can cope with long round trip times but it makes it more sensitive to packet loss so some of the low speed issues might actually not be throttling as such but just how TCP streams react to both high latency and high packet loss.
Fits in with a satellite link - 500ms min plus whatever you would have got. 800ms max is quite long though, possible bufferbloat adding to the problems. Packet loss would be a useful metric but not that easy to discover. Try “ping /t www.bbc.co.uk” and leave it running for a bit and then type Ctrl-C to stop
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> ping /t www.bbc.co.uk
Pinging uk.www.bbc.co.uk.pri.bbc.co.uk [212.58.233.254] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 212.58.233.254: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=55
Reply from 212.58.233.254: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=55
[...]
Reply from 212.58.233.254: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=55
Reply from 212.58.233.254: bytes=32 time=12ms TTL=55
Ping statistics for 212.58.233.254:
Packets: Sent = 18, Received = 18, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 11ms, Maximum = 14ms, Average = 12ms
Control-C
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32>
and let us know the summary - not totally reliable of course because they could give ICMP high priority to make the service look better than it is for packet loss.
