Liquid Telecom's VSAT Internet tested and reviewed

Sounds good if this is your absolute last option for an internet connection. The installation prices should be more reasonable. How many customers do you guys want? It really looks like the marketing and business strategy in this country needs to be improved, too much greed, you have to have BALANCE.
 
VSAT these days is absolute last resort and thanks to Voda/MTN/CellC most of the country is already covered by 3G.
 
R 1 100 for 0.5GB/month? Satellite or not, that's Too Ouch for my eyes, especially considering uncapped is only about 7 times more, and also considering that it's barely 2Mbps with basically dial-up upload speed, with 650ms+ which isn't very comfortable to work with. Last resort, sure, maybe for people with money to throw around xD
 
VioAdmin said:
Sounds good if this is your absolute last option for an internet connection. The installation prices should be more reasonable. How many customers do you guys want? It really looks like the marketing and business strategy in this country needs to be improved, too much greed, you have to have BALANCE.
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Do you know what is involved in a VSAT installation? Do you know the cost of the equipment? In this case it is not expensive because of greed.
 
fragtion said:
R 1 100 for 0.5GB/month? Satellite or not, that's Too Ouch for my eyes, especially considering uncapped is only about 7 times more, and also considering that it's barely 2Mbps with basically dial-up upload speed, with 650ms+ which isn't very comfortable to work with. Last resort, sure, maybe for people with money to throw around xD
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Companies mining and drilling in remote areas, atm's and supermarkets (for security) and last resort for private users (but mostly too expensive).

Africa needs VSAT though. Without it they would mostly be in the dark. They normally share one dish between many users though.
 
There has got to be almost 0 market for this product... maybe in darkest africa and some niche users seeing as the cost is astronomical and the cellular networks are everywhere.
 
Shayd said:
There has got to be almost 0 market for this product... maybe in darkest africa and some niche users seeing as the cost is astronomical and the cellular networks are everywhere.
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Almost 0? Not really. Quite a big niche...
 
There's definitely a place for this product, especially for businesses which operate where (in remote/rural areas) normal facilities don't exist (or obtaining them would take too long). For medium to large corporations, it's affordable...
Mounted 3meter diameter dish doesn't sound so portable though, and dishes are pretty complicated and laborious to set up and align optimally
 
F1ve_Claw said:
So expensive wow

and we complain about dsl prices :O
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You're getting your own pipe through a satellite. What would you expect? Wait till you guys see the costs for the mobile and maritime solutions. You'll fall off your seats.
 
International servers yielded far better results, with tests on Palo Alto's Speedtest.net servers running at speeds of 0.77 Mbps to 1.27 Mbps. London's results were even better, running from 1.33Mbps to 1.91 Mbps.

This suggests that far better backhaul capacity to the UK and the U.S. west coast is available than to South Africa.
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The problem is not back haul related - speedtest does not accurately measure the throughput on high-latency connections - see more at http://www.speedtest.net/qna.php#q13. The sweet and short is that latency effects throughput because of TCP's congestion avoidance algorithms - mostly it takes a long time for a high latency connection to hit peak throughput http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion_avoidance_algorithm.

To really test the satellite' peak throughput I would try to use a bit-torrent protocol, or a really really big download.
 
Quantum Theory said:
fragtion said:
R 1 100 for 0.5GB/month? Satellite or not, that's Too Ouch for my eyes, especially considering uncapped is only about 7 times more, and also considering that it's barely 2Mbps with basically dial-up upload speed, with 650ms+ which isn't very comfortable to work with. Last resort, sure, maybe for people with money to throw around xD
Click to expand...

Companies mining and drilling in remote areas, atm's and supermarkets (for security) and last resort for private users (but mostly too expensive).

Africa needs VSAT though. Without it they would mostly be in the dark. They normally share one dish between many users though.
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It's also actually quite reasonable for VSAT, looking at some of Liquid's competition in the space.
 
Farmers that are far from CBDs would use these probably
 
Latency isn't a satellite connection's strong suit. The problem is the distance a signal needs to travel from the VSAT to the satellite and back down to the earth station, and vice versa.
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That's putting it mildly!

Not great for voip (but then you usually only use that when you are desparate).

Also - I also tested and found that moderate sized e-mails battle to send via Outlook. The system appears to be sending but after a few minutes gives an error. The one time I found I had actually sent the mail 10x, even though Outlook returned the error. A bit embarrassing when interacting with top customers. The larger ones don't actually go through and the mid-sized mails do go through but still give an error!

One solution is to send mail to yourself so you can confirm it went through (but then you double caps usage on large mails!). Other solution is to use a Webmail interface, which seems to send large files more reliably.
 
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