# Satellite broadband vs wireless internet



## BobShoes (Oct 19, 2015)

I've found out my home can only recieve 1mbs download speed through ADSL landline ! So I was wondering which would be better a satellite system which can have download speeds up to 10 mbs or use a wireless provider with speeds up to 5 mbs? I know the satellite has much larger ping times so what difference does this make in real life? 
I intend to surf the web watch videos online that kind of thing.


----------



## snikpoh (Nov 19, 2007)

BobShoes said:


> I've found out my home can only recieve 1mbs download speed through ADSL landline ! So I was wondering which would be better a satellite system which can have download speeds up to 10 mbs or use a wireless provider with speeds up to 5 mbs? I know the satellite has much larger ping times so what difference does this make in real life?
> I intend to surf the web watch videos online that kind of thing.


Why can your WiMax provider only give you 5Mbs? Ours can give us up to 20.


Personally, I would go with WiMax - purely because we have friends who have had no end of problems with satellite and yet our WiMax solution has been brilliant.

Others will have had different experiences but you asked for opinions.


----------



## BobShoes (Oct 19, 2015)

Hi, I can only receive 5 because of my location and the coverage Wimax providers have is not so great in my area. Thanks for you opinion it looks like I'll be using Wimax then.


----------



## el romeral (May 8, 2012)

I guess you have tried Eurona Telecom? They operate in the area and can offer a range of speeds. I pay for 3mb and it works pretty well. Lately the VOIP phone has not been so good though.


----------



## The Skipper (Nov 26, 2014)

BobShoes said:


> I've found out my home can only recieve 1mbs download speed through ADSL landline ! So I was wondering which would be better a satellite system which can have download speeds up to 10 mbs or use a wireless provider with speeds up to 5 mbs? I know the satellite has much larger ping times so what difference does this make in real life?
> I intend to surf the web watch videos online that kind of thing.


Tooway satellite internet gives speeds of 20mb down and 6mb up. We´ve used it for over three years without any problems. Friends who have wireless internet suffer a lot of outages and rarely get the speeds promised. Perhaps it is better in other areas. The slow ping with satellite internet only appears to be a problem when playing online interactive games which don´t interest us, so not a problem. Sometimes there is an echo when using the VOIP phone but friends with wireless internet experience the same problem.


----------



## peedee (Aug 30, 2015)

The Skipper said:


> Tooway satellite internet gives speeds of 20mb down and 6mb up. We´ve used it for over three years without any problems. Friends who have wireless internet suffer a lot of outages and rarely get the speeds promised. Perhaps it is better in other areas. The slow ping with satellite internet only appears to be a problem when playing online interactive games which don´t interest us, so not a problem. Sometimes there is an echo when using the VOIP phone but friends with wireless internet experience the same problem.


Do you get any restrictions on monthly bandwidth?


----------



## BobShoes (Oct 19, 2015)

The Skipper said:


> Tooway satellite internet gives speeds of 20mb down and 6mb up. We´ve used it for over three years without any problems. Friends who have wireless internet suffer a lot of outages and rarely get the speeds promised. Perhaps it is better in other areas. The slow ping with satellite internet only appears to be a problem when playing online interactive games which don´t interest us, so not a problem. Sometimes there is an echo when using the VOIP phone but friends with wireless internet experience the same problem.


What is your ping at the moment? You can check using the speedtest website.
I have researched online and have heard satellite although with 20mb down feel slower in real world performance then Wimax with 5-10mb down because of the high ping. "You would click a link on a web page and, after a noticeable delay, the web page would start downloading and show up almost all at once." 

Also do you use skype or facetime as I want to speak to my daughter and son back in the UK. 
thanks


----------



## bob_bob (Jan 5, 2011)

Satellite is expensive and downloads are capped, if you are watching videos online you'll soon chew through your data allowance so I'd go the wireless route.

The 'top' Tooway package give you 100GB a month which sounds a lot but can easily be used.


----------



## peedee (Aug 30, 2015)

bob_bob said:


> Satellite is expensive and downloads are capped, if you are watching videos online you'll soon chew through your data allowance so I'd go the wireless route.
> 
> The 'top' Tooway package give you 100GB a month which sounds a lot but can easily be used.


Thanks, looking at Movistar at the moment for the landline route (though the website is telling me it can't find my address) as that may be the most reliable though I'm still thinking about wireless.


----------



## Pazcat (Mar 24, 2010)

For me if you need to watch videos and download anything then there is no question that wimax is the best solution available to you as long as they offer a unlimited package.

I'm yet to see a satellite provider offer an unlimited package and even the ones who offer a larger download limit charge extortionately.

We had satellite when we first moved and it was absolutely awful, Skype was horrible to use so we didn't use it in the end.
I do believe that the reason it was so bad for us was the provider more than anything as others claim it does what it says it does but even if we got the full speed it would of still been no good to us.

We changed to wimax and it has been perfect for the last couple of years, zero issues whatsoever. 
Ping is excellent, watching tv online great, Skype works well, online gaming on the PS4 and Wii-U is a breeze and unlimited download for 30 euro a month.
We had the option to change to adsl and thought it wasn't worth it given the varying nature of the copper lines, fiber optic may change my opinion but there is no danger of that being introduced any time soon.


----------



## peedee (Aug 30, 2015)

Pazcat said:


> For me if you need to watch videos and download anything then there is no question that wimax is the best solution available to you as long as they offer a unlimited package.


Thanks. Do you have a link to a website?
What sort of up and down speeds do you get. I'm not into gaming at all but I do upload a lot of largish files and watch a bit of TV


----------



## Pazcat (Mar 24, 2010)

Depends on what area you are in as to which companies operate there but we are with aeromax.
http://www4.aeromax.es/index.en.html

It's only 6gb down and 3 up but that is what they say you get and it is always exactly those speeds, it's good enough to do everything I need and I have never felt I needed any more than that.


----------



## peedee (Aug 30, 2015)

Pazcat said:


> Depends on what area you are in as to which companies operate there but we are with aeromax.
> aeromax. The Wireless Company


Thanks I'll take a look. We are (well will be in a few weeks) just a little further north just outside Gandia


----------



## Desiato (Jun 1, 2015)

I'm with Iberbanda on a 3mb up/down package (speedtest just game me 2.51 up/2.97 down with a 45ms ping) for €47.53 inc IVA and inc home phone line (Iberbanda in English Pricing - Wireless Broadband Internet & Phone in Spain without a landline). My boys do like their on-line computer gaming so they need a stable ping. If you are downloading films/TV shows then that translates into roughly 350k/Bs a second but recently I've noticed my speeds have been throttled to 30k/Bs so I should really cough up and pay for a decent vpn provider. I've just started to download this weeks episode of Homeland and watched the speed go up to 345k/Bs and then come all the way back down to 30k/Bs and then stay there for the last 2 minutes....hmmmm.

I've been with Jazztel and Ono in the past and both have been very flaky with a 1mb speed the best they could offer. I read that it was possible for a line to be 'cleaned' (or words to that effect) in you ring your service provider and ask them to test the line. I asked my wife to do this with Ono as the speeds occasionally dropped to 1/3 of a meg. She did and they said they would look into it. Two days later we were cut off and received a letter saying "sorry but we are no longer able to offer you a service". Niiiiice.

I wouldn't say the wifi/radio line hasn't been without it's problems. The router is your usual lightweight piece of cheap plastic and doesn't even have an on/off switch (you have to pull the power lead out when you want to restart it) and occasionally the speeds can drop to around 1mb. Not quite sure why that is, maybe the weather or trees blowing across the line of site between the antenna and the tower, can't say but on the whole, it's been the best of the bunch.


----------



## The Skipper (Nov 26, 2014)

peedee said:


> Do you get any restrictions on monthly bandwidth?


Yes, you choose the tariff that suits you. We have a download limit of 20gb a month for daytime use but totally unlimited between 11pm and 7am, so we just plan big downloads for the night.


----------



## Rabbitcat (Aug 31, 2014)

20gb a month wouldn't be great for watching live tv


----------



## The Skipper (Nov 26, 2014)

BobShoes said:


> What is your ping at the moment? You can check using the speedtest website.
> I have researched online and have heard satellite although with 20mb down feel slower in real world performance then Wimax with 5-10mb down because of the high ping. "You would click a link on a web page and, after a noticeable delay, the web page would start downloading and show up almost all at once."
> 
> Also do you use skype or facetime as I want to speak to my daughter and son back in the UK.
> thanks


OK, just done a test using Ookla. Here are the results: Download 16839 kbps, upload 6053 kbps, latency 719 ms, Jitter 99ms, packet loss -1%. Yes, we use Facetime regularly but actually find the new Facebook video conferencing more consistently reliable (we can make a Facetime call to one person with excellent quality and then, five minutes later, find connection problems with a new call, possibly due to poor broadband at their end). All I can say is that Tooway satellite broadband suits our needs admirably and when we use our Smartphones at the homes of friends with WIFI internet the speeds we get are noticeably slower. Our friends also get frequent outages which, touch wood, we have not (yet!) experienced with satellite, which we have been using for over three years.


----------



## The Skipper (Nov 26, 2014)

bob_bob said:


> Satellite is expensive and downloads are capped, if you are watching videos online you'll soon chew through your data allowance so I'd go the wireless route.
> 
> The 'top' Tooway package give you 100GB a month which sounds a lot but can easily be used.


We have a 20gb a month package but we have totally unlimited downloads between 11pm and 7am. We have a PC laptop, Apple Ipad, Apple Ipod Touch and two smartphones in use and guests also log on to our system. We download and stream catch-up TV and make video calls. Rarely do we get near to the 20gb limit. If we do we can buy a top-up or just make do with a reduction in speed until the month-end (you don´t lose your internet if you go over your limit but won´t be able to do much more than receive emails or browse the net).


----------



## bob_bob (Jan 5, 2011)

In the UK I'm on unlimited fibre, around 76mb/s and the internet is used a lot. Our monthly usage is never less than 300GB and often over 600GB. Netflix uses around 1GB and hour on standard play and around 3GB and hour for HD content; sites like iPlayer use less but still about 1GB an hour.


----------



## The Skipper (Nov 26, 2014)

bob_bob said:


> In the UK I'm on unlimited fibre, around 76mb/s and the internet is used a lot. Our monthly usage is never less than 300GB and often over 600GB. Netflix uses around 1GB and hour on standard play and around 3GB and hour for HD content; sites like iPlayer use less but still about 1GB an hour.


We can only dream of such speeds in rural Spain! We have no telephone line and in our first few years here we had to rely upon a mobile dongle for the internet. We tried them all and they were all useless (and expensive!)! Trying to bank online with a mobile signal was a joke. We had looked at satellite internet in the early days but ruled it out because of all that we had read. But then we heard about the launch of the new KA-band satellite and this is what we now have. WIMAX did not become available in our area until about a year after we bought the satellite system. If it had been available earlier we would probably have signed up but, as I have said before, our friends who use it have a far inferior service to the one we enjoy. We do not, by the way, need to watch a lot of TV online because we have a 2.4 metre Sky dish.


----------

