VSAT Support
Tooway was North Africa’s first affordable satellite broadband products designed for home users. Tooway is a bidirectional high speed satellite service for broadband Internet access. Bidirectional means that receive and transmit functions are performed via the satellite; therefore there is no need for telephone line.
The home user version of Tooway offers download speeds of up to 20 Mbps and upload speeds at up to 6 Mbps. When we say “up to” we mean this is peak speed wherever you live, Tooway doesn’t discriminate by location. The exact ‘speed’ or performance of your Tooway connection at any given time will depend on a number of factors many of them outside our control. These include the overall busyness of our network at that precise moment, the overall busyness of the public internet, and the protocol or application you’re using at the time.
Yes, you can use a wired or wireless router to connect your Tooway terminal to several PCs or smart phones in your home.
In principle yes and games that don’t involve fast real-time interaction should work fine on Tooway, like chess or backgammon but it is not recommended to play so called “first-person shooter” games.
Any kind of combat or game that involves the need for an immediate reaction will not work so well just due to the extra time involved in the trip to the satellite and back that your data has to make.
At RLTT, we allow package upgrades but not downgrades. If you want to change tariffs you can do this during any month. Your upgrade will be processed on your data reset date (the day your monthly data allowance is normally credited). If you wish for the upgrade to be processed at midnight on the day we receive the instruction, you will be charged for whatever pro-rata part month is applicable between the date you ask us to upgrade you, and your next billing date and then the new tariff you’ve chosen from then on. If you want to process an upgrade/downgrade please contact the Sales Department.
RLTT does not offer any warranty on the hardware for damages, breakages or faults of any kind provided that the hardware was installed and checked to be working fine by the engineer. Customers will need to purchase replacements in the event of any damage or fault with their hardware. For technical faults we have a dedicated Customer Support Department that you can contact and who will gladly assist you with your request
RLTT has developed its Tooway product working with its partners Eutelsat and Skylogic. We have secured a wholesale agreement with Eutelsat enabling us to use up to 1.6Gbit/s of capacity on two KA-SAT spot beams that provide premium reach of Tripoli, Benghazi and surrounding regions. Our use of KA-SAT will accelerate access to high speed Internet for public agencies, enterprises and consumers in the more densely populated areas of Libya.
In order for everyone on the Tooway platform to get a good reliable service, we operate a sophisticated Network Management System. Our Tooway products feature a new ‘Flat Rate’ method of calculating customers’ day-to-day data consumption. This means that right up to when you’ve used all your data allowance for the month, you’ll benefit from the best possible performance available on the network.
Some satellite broadband networks will throttle you even if the network isn’t that busy and the bandwidth to maintain services at full speed isn’t being used by other customers. Our Tooway network won’t do that. Our emphasis is on delivering you the best performance that the network can deliver within your chosen data allowance.
Of course we have to take steps to manage usage. If we don’t customers can suffer from degraded or denied service when one user (or a small group of users) consumes a disproportionate amount of the network’s resources. For instance during peak times, customers who are persistently very heavy users may find that non urgent traffic (like peer-to-peer networking) may be assigned a different priority level by the network to ensure other users receive a good quality service.
The way we manage our network means that if the network is very busy, customers who’ve used less than 50% of their monthly data allowance will be given slightly higher priority to those who’ve used more than 50%. We estimate that this will only occur at the peak times of network activity.
Customers’ data allowances run for 1 month from their connection date, and customer’s data accounts are credited with their new allowance on that date each month.
Your Tooway Installation
You can self-install if you’re good with DIY. Alternatively we offer free installation inside Tripoli/Benghazi and charge a premium rate for any areas outside these two cities. Our installations are carried out by our Certified Installers. Please contact the Sales Department for more information
No, Tooway does not require any cable or phone lines.
Moving the antenna/dish to another location, whether on the same building or otherwise, is obviously possible if you move. It is important to check that the new location falls within the signal area of the satellite beam before dismantling any hardware. RLTT technicians are available to complete the moving work required. Please contact the Sales Department for further information
All you need is a satellite dish and a Tooway Modem. No additional software needs to be installed on your computer to get internet access via Tooway. RLTT strongly recommends that you install a (software or hardware) firewall to protect you from any unwanted attempts to access the files on your computer.
We also suggest you install quality anti-virus software.
Technical Questions
The type of data packet that ping uses is not considered ‘priority traffic’ by our Network Management System and therefore if the network is busy, it won’t accelerate or may even drop the pings you send.
Therefore you will see a much slower response than for instance HTTP traffic which is considered a priority. Try using “ping -t -w 2000″ which will help. Ping is not a reliable method of analysing the performance of satellite broadband systems or services.
“Speed” is a subjective measure of performance. Typical “speed test” websites on the internet are not designed to check satellite based connections. They tend to add the satellites natural latency into the calculation of data over time and come up with an inaccurate result which will be inevitably poorer than the true performance you are actually receiving.
To check your speed, you can make use of our dedicated Tooway speed checker that’s been designed to work accurately with Tooway. (You won’t be able to access this application if you’re not browsing over a Tooway Ka band service. Please do contact us if you think you have a genuine performance issue.)
Overall performance of the service will vary at different times of the day depending on how busy the network and the public internet is and how many users are online at the same time as you. Typically the network will be 40% less busy after 18.30 and before 08.30
Very few, but satellite technology introduces limitations in certain applications. Unlike some of our competitors, our packages accept direct connection to Macintosh, Linux, Unix or Windows based operating systems. If you have an important application, task or protocol that you wish to run over your Tooway terminal, it’s important that as a minimum you discuss the precise details with our sales team before you order. We can then indicate to you if there are any performance issues or limiting factors which we’re aware of, and can give you specific product advice to ensure you’re satisfied with the Tooway option you’re considering.
Tooway Satellite Broadband packages are not suitable for:
Some remote control software
Heavy uplink traffic, such as Web or FTP hosting
Tooway Home for uploading streaming video or professional CCTV monitoring but Tooway Pro works fine
Tooway Home is not ideal for remote access, but Tooway Pro works fine
IPSec VPN applications (SSL VPN applications like on-line banking and secure websites are supported)
Real time on-line gaming (never really practical on satellite based connections)
The up-to-date full speed monthly data allowances for each tariff and service level are outlined on the product chooser page.
If you exceed these amounts, you will find that your connection will be throttled by our Network Management System to around 128/128 kbps.
At this point if you want to upload or download more data at high-speed (before your next month’s data allowance is allocated) you can either buy a 1 or 10GB Volume Booster Token, or upgrade to the next higher tariff (if applicable) which will have a larger data allowance.
If you purchase a ‘bulk’ Volume Booster, it has to be used within the period of your activated data month and the following month or it will expire and any unused data will be relinquished.
The monthly data allowance applicable to your chosen tariff will be allocated to your account on the day you first connect to the Tooway network, and then monthly thereafter on that same day. Details on how we make sure you get a good quality Tooway service are outlined above under the Question “How do you ensure your quoted speeds are achieved?”
Due to the distance travelled by the signal to/from your computer and the Internet Hub via the satellite, some older satellite technologies exhibited a noticeable lag between communications.
Our Satellite Broadband services employ the very latest software and hardware techniques to minimise this lag, including a Performance Enhancing Proxy (PEP)
and web acceleration. In use, when a web page is requested for example, the hardware strips out surplus protocol data and requests, and retrieves the page in fewer larger ‘pieces’, than a typical dial-up connection for example, which assembles the page piece by piece. Similarly this technique is ideal for handling large file or email downloads.
You can obviously use email based faxed services like eFax over the service and these work very well.
But you cannot connect a fax machine to the service.
Located in the SkyPark teleport in Turin (Italy) the platform and hub operations for the Tooway network are operated by Eutelsat’s broadband subsidiary Skylogic. Skylogic employs more than 50 people on site and operates 14 hubs
Using capacity on eight Eutelsat satellites. Dedicated staff will work at the teleport to maintain the highest availability of service.
Although there’s nothing technically to stop you connecting to your company’s corporate VPN with Tooway Home there are some things you need to understand. Check with your IT department at work and find out if your company’s VPN is an IPSec type of VPN.
If it is, these often require a static, public IP address to function. Static IP addresses are only provided on our Tooway Pro products