Burnside provides telephony and 768kbps Broadband Internet access
at any location in Europe - without landlines

Broadband Internet access at any location in Europe

Janet and Peter decided to buy a house in Spain. However, like most new out of town houses, it has no landlines. So the only way they could have telephone communication was to use their mobile phone. Though they could use a mobile connected to their computer for e-mail and internet access, it was complicated to set up, very slow on GSM networks at 9600bps and expensive at speeds of up to 60kpbs on GPRS networks, particularly for downloading large files. Another problem was that their mobile phone did not work reliably inside the house as they are in a poor signal area.

What they wanted was the equivalent of a house phone that anybody could use, but that would also give them low-cost but higher speed broadband access to the Internet. Fortunately, their estate agent had heard about a new Fixed Cellular Terminal from Burnside Telecom - the model T940.

This new terminal provides telephone, SMS text, e-mail and Internet access at any location within GSM/GPRS mobile network coverage. They just needed to insert their mobile SIM into the T940 and connect an ordinary house telephone. They purchased a Moviestar SIM from Telefonica giving them GSM telephony and GPRS data. They then connected three ordinary house phones located in different rooms. The antenna supplied with the T940 produced a much better signal than their handheld mobile and they were able to position it for strongest signal using the T940's built-in signal strength meter.

All they had to do now was to pick up a handset and dial, just as they used to do on their home phone in England. They could even compose send and receive SMS text messages using the display on the phone unit.

Their estate agent also told them about the Broadsat one-way satellite broadband Internet service, costing only EUR189 per year. To connect to this they had to buy a 60cm satellite dish and point it at the Eutelsat satellite. The dish was then connected to their computer via a Digital Video Broadcast [DVB] box using a USB connection. This provided a downlink connection that gave browsing speeds of 768kbps and high-speed file downloads at 2Mbps. To establish an uplink connection, they used their Burnside T940 in GPRS mode. Since uplink data is primarily from the keyboard or e-mail, sending data turned out to be very economical as the charge is based on amount of data sent and not on connected minutes as GSM calls are. Even though they were on the Internet, the Burnside unit could still be used to make and receive phone calls.

To complete their communication system, they also connected their Burnside unit to their alarm system, so that if the alarm were activated they would receive an immediate SMS text message. When Peter has more time he plans to set up the Burnside T940 so that he can send it a text message to turn on his garden sprinkler system when required.

Burnside satellite broadband access