hybrid satellite broadband from only £19.99 per month!
Opensky Limitations
If you are one of the millions who don't have access to terrestrial broadband, then Opensky is a pretty good solution to most people's broadband needs:
- It's available anywhere in the footprint either of 33E or 7E.
- It gives true broadband speeds inbound: often faster than domestic ADSL.
- It's inexpensive: from as little as £19.99 per month.
It also does a couple of things which terrestrial broadband can't.:
- streaming videos without being connected
- broadcast content for downloading and storing on your HDD
Despite this and because it uses different technology, it does have certain limitations compared to terrestrial.
What the service isn't:
- An overnight solution to all internet speed problems.
There is no such thing as a free lunch and even bandwidth has to be paid for. However, this asymmetric high-speed shared service (SatSurf) can help many users access broadband services outside the restricted service areas of the terrestrial offerings. And the connectionless off-line receive services such as video streams (SatTV) and content delivery (SatKiosk) will be useful to users even in these areas.
- Optimised for individual requests for high-bandwidth streams.
If you are a heavy user of such content, the download amount will quickly eat into your monthly allowance. Of course, viewing the streams we broadcast (SatTV) does not use up your allowance. If, however, you want to spend a long time viewing / listening to streams specifically requested by you via the internet, you may find it preferable to use a leased line or other dedicated bandwidth service with a CDR suitable for your needs. As a guide, a 64kbit/s stream will use up 300 Mbytes in 10 hours.
- Suitable for continual heavy download use
To enable as many users as possible gain the benefits of SatSurf broadband browsing at as low a price as possible, limits are placed on the amount of priority data downloaded by each user each month: the "quota". Different quotas are available for different subscriptions. Users are then switched to the "best-efforts" channel, which is unlimited. This protects the quality of service for normal users.
Please also note that abuse of the system is not permitted and will result in withdrawal of service. This includes heavy usage and any attempts to circumvent the performance limits of the system. This is necessary to protect normal users.
- Capable of high-speed uploading
The service is inbound (forward path / download) by satellite and outbound (return path / upload) by your existing access method. You will get the upload speeds of your current access method. Satellite's high-speed comes into play inbound (forward path / download) only.
There are two-way satellite services which deliver high-speed in both directions - but these are more expensive than the OPENSKY™ one-way / hybrid service.
- Always on outbound (but is always on inbound)
Some services - like leased lines - are truly "always on". Others - like ADSL - give the appearance of "always on". OPENSKY™ is truly "always on" for receiving data: the SatTV video streams, SatKiosk content carousel and, in time, your e-mails and scheduled download requests. When you want to upload or interact via SatSurf, you will need to activate your usual access method.
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