SATELLITE INTERNET

VSAT terminals are installed at your sites by authorised installers. Each terminal consists of a small dish installed outside at a carefully selected position to ensure it has a ‘clean’ path between the dish and the satellite. The dish connects via a coaxial cable to the satellite modem installed indoors, delivering internet access via its ethernet port(s). The satellite ‘relays’ signals in the Ka-frequency band, between the VSAT terminal and an earth-station in Frankfurt, ‘connecting’ the VSAT terminal to the Internet.

The service is available throughout South Africa, except for small areas in the Northern Cape and North West Province. Coverage is delivered via 6 high-power spot-beams, each focused on a specific part of the country, overlapping in some areas.

The further a customer is located away from the centre of the spot-beam (where signals are the strongest), the weaker the signals become. For sites towards the edges of the beams, we compensate for the ‘weaker’ signal by using a larger dish. The 2 dish sizes being deployed for this service are: 74cm (oval) and 98cm (round) and this is dependent on feasibility.

There are numerous packages available to choose from. The advertised speeds are maximum “burstable” throughputs. Our network capacity planning aims to ensure that during the busiest hours of usage, the throughput over the satellite path does not drop below 30% of the link’s maximum speed.

To ensure voice quality, a network connection must support a feature called ‘Quality Of Service (QoS)’ that prioritises voice traffic over normal data traffic (e.g. http, YouTube, torrents, etc.). If you need to run telephone calls, please ensure that you inform us that you require a ‘Voice’ enabled service plan. These are specifically designed to prioritise voice and supports between one to eight concurrent G.729 encoded voice calls – depending on the service plan selected.

Our service uses sophisticated acceleration techniques to enable high-speed performance over high-latency satellite links. Without this feature, TCP connections would only deliver a throughput of around 100Kbps – simply because of the round trip latencies involved over satellite connections.

These acceleration technologies cannot accelerate traffic running inside tunnels. Tunnel payloads are commonly encrypted in any event, making it impossible to analyse the packet payload to attempt acceleration.

When running VPN tunnels over satellite internet, customers need to implement their own TCP acceleration system. Otherwise the performance will be limited to around 100Kbps – regardless of service plan being used.

5Mbps: Will be throttled to 3Mbps after a 100GB used, 1.5Mbps after 150GB used and 1Mbps after 200GB’s used during the monthly data cycle.

10Mbps: Will be throttled to 5Mbps after a 150GB used,3Mbps after 250GB used and 1.5Mbps after 300GB’s used during the monthly data cycle.

20Mbps: Will be throttled to 10Mbps after a 200GB used, 5Mbps after 350GB used and 2Mbps after 400GB’s used during the monthly data cycle.