Mobile Satellite

CivilServant

I'm living in a rented house at the moment and am very interested in getting the europeonline setup for myself. I have a few questions that I'd like answered before I take the plunge.

1. You have to setup a satellite first in order to get the signal and data. Is it hard to setup a satellite yourself?

2. Once I have it setup how difficult is it to move it from one place to another. Say if I was moving out of the house to somewhere else.

3. How expensive is going to be all together, ie. for the satellite, dvb card, dial-up connection etc.

4. How are the people that have eonline service finding the dial-up expenses? I'd be interested in staying online for long periods so that will rack up the phonebill.

Appreciate all replies, if you can even answer one question at a time, please do so thanks.

Saruman

Firstly yo need to be sure what service you want.. Europe Online is not an ISP, Its an offline file fetch service among other things... Basically you log on with your dial up, go to their site and input the URL of a file or files... Or use FFM which is more like file sharing... much better option... then disconnect, leave your PC and it will download at a sheduled time offline...

OK thats EONLINE.. they also have a subscription service for 1 way sat conenction... you are limited to either 10 or 20 hours for your monthly fee (extra to Eonline fee) and once your over that its pay per min so works out expensive...

I use Netsystem instead... its better and has no cap or limits... used on conjunction with Eonline's file fetch service its fantastic...

As for cost... dial up will be the same as you pay now... the satellite will be about €120 for an 80cm from www.satellite.ie I got this and along with install i paid €269 i think... Tony was excellent... If you want to do yourself? Thats more difficult, if you have to ask then you will probably run into no end of trouble... for instance its not a case of getting a compas and pointing it to 19.2 east... my dish actually points more a westerly direction so.... no wonder i could not manage to do it myself.. Better to get someone to do it for you... if you move... you can take the dish down yourself no problem... and if you watch the guy install it you will probably figure out how to do it.

Oh yeah the DVB card is €59 and your subscription to EON till October.

CivilServant

That's great Saruman, thanks a million! You've answered a lot of my questions.

But I was still wondering how much would a dial-up bill be for a netsystem/eonline user? I'm only using the internet for a small amount of browsing because it takes ages to download anything through a 56k dialup. But if I had the satellite system then I'd be on all hours of the day. It'd be great if I could get nolimits or some other flat rate service. How long will we have to wait for UTV flat rate, arghhh!!!

Saruman

I wish i had signed up to no limits when it was available... damn it.. Anyway i dont know about my phone bill for netsystem... no difference for eonline.. in fact it probably went down as i do the filefetching in work and only log on at home to do the request and get my scheduled time so thats only a few mins.

Netsystem is different... spent over 5 hours online the other day downloading stuff... including another version of SW ep2! So could work out somewhat expensive... that day at least would have cost about €5 - €6 or so.

CivilServant

Yeah if I got a fast file transfer system going I'd probably spend at least 5 hours a day. I remember the days when I was connected up to the LAN in college, granted speeds were ****e during the day but during the night was when the fun began. After 8 you'd get maybe 30 - 60k. Then after 12 over 100k. I remember getting 900kb/sec but that was with 20 threads open.

Anyways, I need fast internet for today! I could do a file fetch at work. But eonline only lets u download a certain amount each month, right? I'd need to do some serious downloading so that might not be an option. If I spent 5 hours a day 5-6 euro times 7 days a week equals 35 - 42 euro a week.

Maybe I'd be better off getting that 1mb ADSL connection from eircom. Save the hassle of getting a satellite installation too. What do you think?

byte

EON lets you download as much as you can handle per month. It's possible to get over 6GB of downloads per night! Though a lot of these would not be what you want. Note that this is the scheduled download service. The EON Skybooster is where you can download in realtime like Netsystem which Saruman uses and could give u more help on. And, yes Skybooster is capped. AFAIK, it is a small cap and probably useless. Netsystem is not capped.

CivilServant

Yeah, I was trying to look up more basic information on subscribing to the basic service eonline provides but all I could find was skybooster this and skybooster that. So if skybooster is 59 euro I think. How much is the basic service?

If the ADSL thing falls through I might just get this one. So there are lots of options for broadband in Ireland after all.....?

byte

The standard EON service is €59 including DVB PCI card. It's approx €70 including postage and handling. It's worth it for DVB card alone as you can use it to watch the free channels on Astra tho not many in English except Sky News, CNN and CNBC. Oh and Radio Caroline, which is apparently good.:rolleyes: