This is my first post over our new satellite broadband service. I finally gave up with BT’s 0.5mb service and went to a satellite service provided by Tooway and sold through Avonline Broadband. The satellite was installed last week with very little effort but I had not realised that I also needed to buy a DSL router (less than £20) and had to wait for that before I could link the satellite to our wireless network.

I had toyed with this for some time but when I last looked the amount of data you could download in a month was too restrictive. That has changed markedly and I now have a service which offers 18mb download speeds and 6mb upload, for up to 26gb per month. Initial performance tests suggest the target speeds are pretty close to what is delivered. Of course, communicating via satellite does introduce a latency at the start of each request but it is certainly no greater than the latency inherent in a 0.5mb service anyway.

So far so good. We’ll see if it stays up and continues to deliver high performance. I’ll report back if so, but in the mean time first impressions are very positive.