SAT TV Internet Over Sat or Telephone network

Simple question grateful for any advice....Do I need 2 sat dishes if I am to receive UK FreeTV and French TV?


Secondly, I have been advised to go for Internet over Satellite rather than down the wire supplied by FT-Orange although the area (23380) is allegedly good for ADSL apparently this might not be the case. Anybody with experience of TooWay which I believe is UK based or BDCSAT2WAY which is France based?


Many thanks



Patrick


Thanks Ian. As we both have i-pads and the kids too when they visit I'll make sure it is up to the job.

Dick

Hi Dick, Not a problem.

The Tooway signal goes into a Tooway modem, which I presume unscrambles/decodes the signal into something that you can view. Into this modem you can just plug a wifi router and off you go.

In our house the Tooway modem is in my office. The wi-fi router is plugged into this and I have hardwired my own computer directly into the wi-fi router. This gives the best of both worlds. Direct connection for my machine and wireless for anywhere else in the house.

Word of warning, which we learned the hard way, we have had the system for over 2 years, and the wi-fi router supplied at the time by the company we bought from was really not up to the job (it was cheap!!) as we soon discovered when our grandkids arrived, and all logged in with their iphone, ipads etc the router couldn't cope and the speed ground to a halt. If you anticipate having several people logged in at the same time, get a wi-fi router designed to cope. We upgraded, and now no problem.

Regards

Ian

Thanks Ian. Was hoping to connect to a wi-fi router rather than direct to computer due to location within the house.

Dick

The Tooway dish is a parabolic 72x68cm. It is not a standard dish and does not use an LNB but uses a transmit and receive device called a Tria.

Do it yourself instructions for installing and pointing are at www.accesointernetsatelital.com/downloads/KaSat-DIY.pdf

Hope this helps

Ian

Can someone please tell me how big a dish is required just for internet by satellite and where to point it. I currently get UK TV with a 60cm dish in Charente-Maritime.

Hi Patrick,

To answer your questions, it is possible to use one dish for both UKFreeTV and FrenchTV, but you need 2 lnb's (heads) attached to one dish. This gives good signal quality, but not as good as 2 separate dishes.

If you also wanted to have satellite broadband you would need an additional dish for this as they need to point to different satellites. To receive both satellite broadband and UKFreeTV you would need 2 dishes, mounting kit, cabling, 2 receivers and a subscription for the broadband.

Satellite broadband provides you with a UK IP address so you can access all the usual UK sites like BBC iplayer, ITV iplayer, netflix and Lovefilm etc and is great for anyone who lives in an area with poor or no adsl line. I would suggest checking to see what your neighbours or other English speakers in your area use. If a direct neighbour has satellite broadband it is possible to split this connection so you can both use the same connection saving you both money without compromising on signal strength. For example, I live in a row of 4 house and we have 1 satellite dish which we share between us, we download and live stream all the time and our son plays games online with no problems.

It is more expensive than traditional methods, but there are a plenty of options from buying your equipment outright to renting over 24 months and you can adjust your plan at any time based on your usage. Satellite broadband has come a long way in recent times!

Another benefit is you don't need a phone line (don't have to deal with Orange or SFR!) and can have the VOIP option which provides you with a UK phone number (or 2 if you need) as well as cheap - unlimited calls in Europe for under €10 per month.

If you would like more advice in choosing the best options, please don't hesitate to get in touch. We are based in France and available any time to discuss your requirements.

Andy @ Astrasat.tv

Hi Ian, we have had Siemens VOIP telephones for a time, waiting for the right connections, then when Tooway appeared that seemed the way to go. Tooway in France have one of their suppliers who offers OVH. I am likely to get my 'kit' from bigdishsatellite a company close to us, who were originally supplying Sky boxes (but NOT cards), and have gradually switched to Freesat and now Satellite. John from there recommended OVH, who advertise an individual SIP line for 1.18€ a month giving free calls to French fixed lines and in 40 countries (obviously including UK and Ireland) and mobile and other International calls charged by the second. When I discovered it took a while to get set up with the line, I went ahead, even though I don't have Tooway yet. Have yet to program my Siemens phones, but theoretically they should work over the FT/Wanadoo ADSL Internet connection.

The OVH website detail is as follows:

http://www.ovhtelecom.fr/telephonie/

Thanks for the info on your calls, sounds just what I need. At times out Internet signal fades to poor to non-existant.

Ah. Good thought, Not sure, I will check my UK telecom bill.

Have anyone experienced UK Telcom telephone over internet?

Gordon

Hi Gordon,

But are people in France calling you having to pay international mobile rates?

Ian

I mustn't keep going on, but I have found that an ASDA pay as you go is cheaper in France than LeClerec's low user rate! And you just dial the french number you need. No 00

Gordon

Hi Gordon,

You are quite right in that it is a UK number, and french callers will pay international charges.

When we made the choice, we thought about where most of our call would come from. I still have clients in the UK and most don't know I have moved to France!

We also soon discovered that most of our English speaking friends in France have deals with UK Telecom, Orange et al to get free UK phone calls, so it doesn't bother them at all, although they did find it a bit strange at first phoning a UK number to talk to us down the road!! But that is what technology can do.

For those without these deals, we also have a French Leclerc mobile, so they can call that instead.

In the last 3 months, that has only rung once, and one big plus of not having a French landline number is that we don't get any of the sales calls that so many people complain about.

Regards, Ian

Hi Roger, Would love to know more about the OVH offer.

Comparing VOIP over satellite to that over the internet - not really a great deal of difference. Occasionally it suffers from a slight lag, similar to what you see with broadcasts coming from the USA, of about half a second, but this doesn't happen all the time. If it does, and you will soon know, as you start to talk over each other, just pause for half a second before replying. The call quality itself is fine.

If you think that the signal is being sent up thousands of miles to the satellite, then back to the base station in Italy, then on to the UK, I'm amazed it doesn't happen all the time

One thing to watch out for is that the phone adapter you get is compatible with Tooway. When we first got Tooway, I already had a VOIP box from Vonage, which I used in the UK successfully, but it just wouldn't work properly with Tooway. I could make outgoing calls, but any dialling me got a message saying number out of order.

We got our current box from our Tooway provider, in this case Avonline, and it is a Cisco Phone adapter, and it is fine.

I would be lying if I didn't say it is a compromise, but as I don't need to pay for a phone line, occasionally having to pause for half a second is acceptable, and as I said in my earlier post, we cant get ADSL or Wimax, so we had to come up with the most acceptable compromise.

I do resent paying FT for a phone line that cant do anything but make phone calls!

Hope this helps, and if you want to ring me to find out the quality, PM me for the phone number.

Regards, Ian

Ian,

As I understand it, you effectively have a UK telephone. What charges do french callers pay? Local or international? I use UK telecom for my telephone and FT line rental, and have been very satisfied. I am thinking of going over to there complete package ( telephone over internet ) Any comments please.

Gordon

Watching the tennis the difference in tv picture quality is obvious. The adsl tv is over compressed, in a pretty dumb way, so the ball sort of skips along its path (disappears and reappears). On satellite it's correct. We live in town, I seem to remember the meqasured speeds is 2MB/s, which is fine for general internet use.

Hi Ian, reading through this latest discussion on Internet Satellite, I was interested to know how good, or bad, your VOIP telephone connections are over the satellite. I'm about to go the Tooway route because Orange/Wanadoo is so very bad for the Internet, but my only reservation is the quality of calls. As part of that I have signed up with OVH and have an 09 number and telephone line connection via the Internet, which simply costs me 1.18€ a month - thought that might interest you.

Hi Patrick

If you're sure you can't get decent ADSL where you are (do check,as it will be cheaper than satellite), then I thoroughly recommend Tooway. We used to be with Nordnet. If there was a technical problem I had to try to translate techy stuff (which I didn't really understand in English, let alone French), into English for my husband to try to resolve the issue. At least with Tooway (now Eurosat, I think), it's an English helpline, English payments (if you wish, tho' it can be euros), and an English IP address (useful for BBC iplayer). Check how far you are from your local ADSL booster. Max limit is 7km (and near that limit you'll have slow internet).

Good luck.

Hi Patrick

I will be able to tell you more about tooway (internet satellite in general)in a few weeks when i do their course in England as i know you will get an English ip address but are limited to bandwith usage so streaming may take it all. There is no need for an English satellite dish with this as you can do everything over the net with them if you have a pc linked to your tv.

When i fit dishes here i normally fit a dish set to astra for English and a normal antenna for French then run them down one cable through a splitter system to save time and cost.

If you take out a contract for adsl which we have and have no issues with although we are close to the exchange the contracts normally include tv which you will need a satellite for but you can opt out of this option if needs be.

You can get as said earlier twin lnb's with French and English from the same satellite, however these are singular cables and you can't service more than one room with them.

I'm not in your area so not sure what they would do where you are.

The internet looks like it's going to be the future option according to talk and other forums but be careful as if you have a French ip address a lot of ENGLISH sites are now using ip hider finder software. Gambling sites are the first such as pkr and dusk 'til dawn poker sites which i know first hand and can't get on even using a paid service and itv player has started asking for a postcode when using a ip hider. There is vpn services which you can find on the net but cost more.

Hope some of this helps

We live quite far from our exchange yet we receive a very good and fast ADSL connection, we can both watch videos on Utube on separate PC's whilst being on the Internet phone all at the same time. It is worth checking to see if you can get a good Internet connection before going down the satellite path. I should add that we have been with Orange for over 10 years and apart from one month when a farmer ripped the cable s up, we have never ever had a single problem.

Regards, Mike L

Hi Patrick and all -

we have Freesat / Sky AND French TNT on one dish... you don't have to have two dishes, you just need a slightly bigger dish - But you do need TWO LNB's - one to point at Astra for the UK and one to point at the French satellite... We did it ourselves, it's not difficult, just a (massive) fiddle and much shouting between the two of us! You can buy all the stuff you need online or in a good Augier. You don't have to have the dish on your roof either - it just needs a clear line of site to the sky!!!

x teresa