Barrett Xplore Inc. Buys Storm Internet Services wireless operations

I was notified by email from Barry Williams, president of Storm Internet Services and by comment posting from Tony that Storm's wireless business has been bought by Barrett Xplore, a.k.a. Xplornet. The contents of the email which I (and presumably all Storm wireless customers) received are given below.

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Storm Internet Services and Barrett Xplore Inc. (www.xplornet.com), through its Xplornet brand, are pleased to announce that Xplornet will now be the service provider for Storm's wireless Internet services
customers. Barrett Xplore is Canada's largest and fastest growing wireless Internet Service Provider (ISP), with tens of thousands of subscribers across the country.

Xplornet offers both fixed wireless and satellite high-speed Internet services, enabling Xplornet to reach virtually every single Canadian. We are confident that you will be pleased and impressed with Xplornet's service offering.

Some benefits of Xplornet are:

• 24/7/365 technical support
  
• Guaranteed rates: your rate will be protected for the duration of your contract
  
• No additional download volume fees
  
• All customers receive 2 Gig of storage with Xplornet email accounts
  

The process of moving each customer to Xplornet's service is expected to take a few months. Xplornet will contact each Storm customer individually starting in April 2008 to begin this transition process. Customers will be grouped by area served and package type in order to
coordinate the appropriate equipment changes/upgrades and to answer any questions you might have about Xplornet services. Rest assured that this is being done over a period of time to ensure that each customer is handled with the great concern and care that Xplornet prides themselves on providing.

Until the time that you are contacted by Xplornet and converted to their equipment and service packages, you will continue to contact Storm for all technical, billing, questions and problems. Storm will also be billing you during this period.

When you are contacted by Xplornet they will be happy to answer any questions that you have concerning this conversion.

Kindest Regards,

Barry Williams
President
Storm Internet Services

HiSpeed in West Carleton Update

I am posting this West Carleton HiSpeed Internet update at the request of Sulo Viherjoki, the author. I have made only minor changes/additions. --Chris

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The winter is almost over (touch wood!) and thought I'd give you and your readers an update about what has happened in my neck of the woods since December 2007. I have received responses from some of your readers on my original posting.

There is nothing new to report on from Xplornet and my friends/politicians at city hall.

No new news to report from Sympatico Unplugged or Xplornet either.

However, Rogers has a cell tower within viewing range of my living room window and it supports Rogers Portable Internet. To my knowledge, the only subscriber is the property owner on which the tower is located. He (a mutual friend) was unaware until I told him that Rogers had Wireless internet on this tower. This tower is located on the south side of Richardson Side Road, mid way between the intersections of David Manchester Road and Spruce Ride Road.

Note that although the Rogers website shows only limited access from this tower, their coverage map may be overly pessimistic. This is after talking to their staff at the Rogers Centrum Kanata location. Since they have both an inside and outside installable modem available, I am optimistic that I will be able to get a signal. I have to wait till the snowbanks around my house are gone though!

In addition, I would like to share with you and your readers that the current issue (April 2008 - No. 199) of Harrowsmith Country Life has an article on Rural Internet Options ("High Speed in Cow Country"). The 2 highlights of the article IMHO are:

1.) All of Nunavut now has high-speed, and

[Chris' note: While this may be true, my understanding is that most of the high-speed is satellite based.]

2.) a small startup homebrew operation near Woodstock, Ontario is offering wireless service for a one time connect/install fee of $99 and monthly charges of $29. They were able to do this in most cases by partnering with local farmers to install their equipment on silos, rather than building expensive expensive towers from the ground up.

[Chris' note: The now-defunct Arryba Communications tried to do something similar. In the fact, the tower that services my home is mounted on a silo about 2 kilometres up the road. I think some other small ISPs in the area (Northwind?) are doing something similar as well, but I could be wrong. In any case, I think co-op ISPs are an excellent grass-roots means of getting high-speed to rural areas; I considered do it myself.]

Sulo Viherjoki

City Responds to West Carleton Posting

In response to an earlier posting on this blog entitled "Internet Hi-Speed (Broadband) Access in West Carleton", Chris Cope, Economic Development Consultant for the City of Ottawa, has requested that I post the following message.

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As subject matter expert on the City's Broadband initiative, I'd like to respond to a number of recent enquiries and expand a bit on the objectives of the City’s broadband initiative. I hope that you will post this to your blog so that everyone can learn about the City's process and the reason that we are confident in, and excited to be announcing that "every house in Rural Ottawa now has access to high speed."

Right up front, I want to confirm that the City continues to work with Xplornet to assess today's fixed wireless coverage to determine if additional coverage is required. The process is well underway and will continue throughout the term of the City's contract with Xplornet. Although so far, the focus has been on the gaps designated by the City as having no service, many other areas are covered as well.

Some areas in West Carleton are heavily forested in every direction. In that context, one of the features that makes these neighbourhoods so wonderful, also limits broadband connectivity. The physics of radio frequency propagation (and not any plan to force customers toward satellite service) works against these locations regardless of tower heights. Cell phone coverage is spotty in West Carleton as well, as everyone knows, but that technology uses licensed radio spectrum which by nature, has a much greater ability of dealing with topography and foliage issues because of both frequency and significantly higher signal power.

High-speed or "broadband" Internet is not a utility that is provided by the City, but rather a communication service that is provided by independent private companies. Since 2003, the City has worked with virtually all of these companies, but they have increasingly indicated that there is no business case to spend money on infrastructure to extend their services beyond the larger villages and other populated areas. Where population is sparse, their investment would not provide a reasonable business return on investment even if everyone signed up for the service. This resulted in a situation where by fall 2006, about 40% of rural Ottawa had no access to any form of high-speed Internet and people living in these gap areas were unable to enjoy increasingly media-rich Internet sites and services using dial-up. The situation in West Carleton was even worse, where about two thirds of the homes in the Ward were unable to access any form of broadband.

The City wanted everyone to be able to have high-speed and set out to find a way that would cause one or more companies to accelerate their plans to extend their high-speed service to previously un-serviced areas. The private/public (P3) partnership with Barrett Xplore inc. (Xplornet) does just that, by providing a suite of high-speed services to the areas previously without service. We are delighted to be in a position to say that now everyone in rural Ottawa has access to some form of high-speed service and at prices that are similar to service offerings in urban Ottawa.

Xplornet offers a variety of services and although they are concentrating on their wireless service, they also offer a group of satellite high-speed options. There are up to 5 wireless packages varying from varying from $29.99 to $59.99 per month with corresponding download speeds between 300 Kbps to 5.0 Mbps. Not all wireless services are available in all areas however, and because Xplornet uses line-of-sight technology for their fixed wireless system there will be some rural Ottawa residents, especially those that live in heavily forested areas or where topography works at odds to a strong signal, who cannot receive fixed wireless service. That's why Ottawa and Xplornet are offering state-of-the-art satellite broadband to ensure everyone has access to high-speed.

There are 4 satellite packages available for consumers with speeds varying from 512 Kbps to 2.0 Mbps at prices ranging from $49.99 to $179.99 per month. The basic installation fee for satellite is an "all-in" fee of $199 on a 3-year contract. This compares to elsewhere in Canada where the same installation is $399 for equipment plus the cost of labour resulting in a total cost of $600 to $900.

For comparison, one of the major telephone companies in Ottawa offers high-speed service in the City's urban area at $49 per month although they too have smaller and larger packages. Their wireless service is $55 per month. Similarly, a local cable company offers their most popular Internet on Cable service at $52.95 per month (plus $3 per month modem rental or $99.95 modem purchase plus taxes) although they too have several other packages including a light version at $32.95 Monthly Service Fee (plus $3 per month modem rental or $99.95 modem purchase plus taxes).

Some people are disappointed to learn that their home is not in a location where wireless service is available, but satellite service while a little more expensive is a tremendous improvement over dial-up. To give you a sense of this, here's a quote from Suzanne Bird, who operates a business from her home and is a recent satellite customer. Ms. Bird lives in a neighbourhood in West Carleton called the Pinery, which has beautiful tall trees:

"As a "mum-preneur" balancing being a mom and operating my own business, I was having serious difficulty making the business work effectively in rural Ottawa. Why? Because like most businesses, photography is becoming more and more reliant on the internet - being able to send and receive images electronically instead of couriering or driving hard copies to clients around Ottawa. A rural business like mine was at a huge disadvantage because dial-up Internet made sending large files simply impossible.

I was at an impasse. The only way to balance rural living, family care and business was with high-speed Internet. Now that I have Xplornet using a satellite system my business has fundamentally changed. The gap between myself and photographers in urban Ottawa has closed, and I'm experiencing both growth in business, and more time at home. There's no question in my mind that business in rural Ottawa will expand, and the rural Ottawa lifestyle will get even better than it was before."

It is important to note too, that should Xplornet's fixed wireless service become available at a later date to residents in areas not presently served by wireless, Xplornet will install the new wireless service and remove the satellite service at no additional cost. People should also know that Xplornet has a 30-day risk free guarantee. If they end up going ahead with the satellite service, they have 30 days to kick tires and if during that time they want to cancel, Xplornet will cancel the contract, come and remove the equipment and give them back their money. Xplornet is committed to having only satisfied customers and this seems to me to be an excellent way of ensuring this.

I hope this information is informative. I would encourage anyone with additional questions to follow up with me directly.

Chris Cope
Economic Development Consultant
Economic and Environmental Sustainability Branch
Email: Chris.Cope@ottawa.ca
(613) 580-2424 ext. 28991

OBJ article: Hydro Ottawa to sell off telecom business

The Ottawa Business Journal published an article called 'Hydro Ottawa to sell off telecom business' on Friday, December 7, 2007.

Although Telecom Ottawa provides service mainly in metro Ottawa, I mention in this blog simply because Telecom Ottawa also provides the fibre-optic internet backbone used by many ISPs in the area, including rural Ottawa. Thus, the article is at least indirectly relevant to this blog.

The Packet article: Get connected: Broadband internet comes to rural Ottawa

The Friday, December 7, 2007 edition of The Packet contains an article on page 5 entitled 'Get connected: Broadband internet comes to rural Ottawa'. The article basically is basically high-level information about Xplornet's deployment of fixed wireless and satellite high-speed internet service in the rural Ottawa and adjacent areas, plus some background history on the City's rural high-speed internet initiative.

For the most part, there is nothing important in the article that hasn't been covered previously on this blog. The main item of interest is the accompanying graphic, which shows a map of Xplornet's fixed wireless coverage. The map shows solid, blanket fixed wireless coverage for all of Ottawa outside the urban core, except for the south west corner of the City limits, i.e. Burritt's Rapids area. It also shows Xplornet's fixed wireless coverage extending well south of Kemptville along the 416 corridor. Everything else on the map is indicated to be covered by Xplornet's satellite service. The fixed wireless coverage indicated on the map paints a more thorough coverage than readers and contacts from West Carleton are reporting, so there appears to be a discrepancy somewhere.

The article also gives the following contact info, which except for the phone number, have also been previously published on this blog (and appear in the right margin of the main page).

• www.xplornet.com
  
• www.ottawa.ca/rural
  
• 1-866-841-6001
  

The Packet is a free community newspaper serving South Ottawa, Richmond, Kemptville, and Merrickville. The afore-mentioned article does not appear to be available online, nor does The Packet appear to have any online presence.

Internet Hi-Speed (Broadband) Access in West Carleton

I received the following email from a reader, who requested that I post it on my blog. It is addressed to his fellow residents in West Carleton. I have not edited the content.

-Chris

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Hi Neighbour:

You have read in the press that Ottawa city council has provided taxpayer funding to a private sector firm to provide competitive internet access to rural areas which the current ISPs (Internet Service Providers) are not servicing.

The contract was awarded to Barrett Xplornet ( http://www.xplornet.com ). You may even have received one of their brochures in your mailbox in the last 2 or 3 months.

Our local councilor had the following information posted:

http://www.ward5eli.com/content.php?doc=79

The current status is that Barrett committed to having their service up and running by October 31, 2007, with free installation (as opposed to a competitors $400 installation charge in this area). Due to delays this offer was extended to November 12th, which has now expired.

After discussions with the players/stakeholders (our city councilor, city bureaucrats, local dealer installers and the service provider (Barrett), I have come to these conclusions:

1. Barrett cannot provide reliable service in an area approximating and bounded by March Road on the north, Spruce Ridge on the west, William Mooney on the east and Richardson Side Road on the south. This is an area of 2K by 6K (about 12 square kilometers).

2. While some of you in this area may currently have:

i) hispeed access to Barrett due to favorable topography (access is line of sight dependent), but if it is marginal now, then the service will degrade as the trees continue to grow.

ii) access to a previously defunct ISP being serviced by a tower at the corner of David Manchester & Richardson, this service is not guaranteed to continue. In addition, the ISP servicing this tower was charging a $400 installation fee.

3. The tactic of Barrett and the city is to try and steer you to their satellite service. This is unacceptable for financial, practical and operation reasons. The cost is higher and there are delays in bouncing the signal 25,000 miles up and back down again. There may also be obstructions to your view of the satellite.

Real estate agents have told me access to Hi-Speed (Broadband) is a prerequisite to selling your property, so even if you are currently satisfied with your dialup connection or do not currently access the internet, access to Hi-Speed is in your interests.

If this issue is of concern to you, I urge you to contact the following players/stakeholders:

Councilor: Eli.El-Chantiry@ottawa.ca

City Bureaucrat: Chris.Cope@ottawa.ca

Barrett: BillM@BarrettXplore.com, JackieK@BarrettXplore.com, lenm@BarrettXplore.com, LeslieC@BarrettXplore.com

Why am I not providing my name and address/email?

1. There is no other information that I can provide.

2. If this issue is of concern to you, I want you to get the information directly from the guys in charge.

3. Well OK, if you really want to contact me: definnbaker@yahoo.com

Rogers Portable Internet availability tool

I just noticed this, and thought I'd pass it on. Rogers has recently improved their Portable Internet Availability Tool.

Previously, it would ask you for your postal code, and for some of us rural folks, that can be a big area and the service availability would thus be indeterminant.

The new version (and I'm not sure how long it's been this way) will ask you for your address or the nearest intersection, and it will display a colour-coded map which will indicate if you can use an indoor modem or if you will have to get an outdoor modem installed. Even if the search tool cannot find your address or intersection, you can simply select your home city from the MapControl widgit, and then drag the resulting map to your neighbourhood to see what, if any, Portable Internet service is available to you.

Portable Internet (standard) has peak advertised speeds of 1.5 Mbps down and 256 Kbps up (~26x dial-up down and 4x dial-up up). The lite version, Rogers Portable Internet Basic, has peak download speeds of 256 Kbps (4x dial-up); no upload speed posted.
Please refer to the above links or go to Rogers main site for more details.

Xplornet's Burst and Sustain Rates: Fair Access Policy

A few weeks ago, I asked Chris Cope of ORCNet if he could review a comment left by an anonymous poster on November 2. The comment was in regard to Xplornet's sustained and burst download speeds.

Today, I received a response from Chris. He had forwarded my email onto to people at Barrett Xplore, who provided the response below. Posted with permission.

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Hi Chris,

I asked Barrett Xplore Inc. (BXI) to provide an answer to the question you received. Here is their response and please feel free to post it on your blog.

Fair Access Policy

BXI manages subscriber usage by implementing a burst and sustained model. This approach ensures that every subscriber receives a quality Internet experience on a shared network. Our competitive intelligence of our industry category would indicate that all sustainable and reputable service providers implement some type of similar procedure. Instead of limiting the amount of throughput usage during an hour, day or month, our bandwidth control is implemented on a per transaction basis. A transaction could be the click of a mouse on a web site that downloaded a new page or a download or upload of a music file or any other similar transactions. When a customer initiates a transaction, the initial speed of the data transfer is determined by the burst speed of the service package. Once a volume threshold is reached during that transaction, the data transfer rate changes to the sustained speed setting. Once the transaction is completed, the system immediately reverts to the burst mode.

During normal web browsing, the system would always be operating at the burst rate. The only difference would be with larger file downloads where initial data transfer would be at the burst rate and then, depending on the size of the file, the remaining portion would be downloaded at the sustained rate. The next transaction would in turn commence at the full burst rate.

BXI does not publish specific package configurations as it is competitive information that allows us to differentiate ourselves and consistently offer quality services to all our users. Most ISP’s do not publish their settings as they become unique features of each provider.

The Fair Access Policy (FAP) approach is further described on our Website in the Legal section.

Chris Cope
Economic Development Consultant
Economic and Environmental Sustainability Branch

ORCNet: High-speed Internet service is now available to everyone in rural Ottawa

A letter from Chris Cope, Executive Director ORCnet:

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I am delighted to announce to the members of the ORCnet mailing list that your wait for high-speed Internet service is over. Xplornet, a division of Barrett Xplore, in partnership with the City of Ottawa, is excited to announce that high-speed Internet service is now available to every home and business in rural Ottawa.

Xplornet high-speed Internet service

* Fast, with speeds up to 5.0 Mbps (185 times faster than dial up)
* Affordable, starting from just $29.99 per month
* 30-day money-back guarantee
* No phone line required
* Serviced by local dealers
* Free 24/7/365 technical support

You are invited to attend one of the following events to help us celebrate the launch of high-speed Internet service for everyone in Ottawa. Also, you will be able to get more information about Xplornet, and if you wish, to sign up to this service with a special offer. I hope I will see you at one of these events Christopher.

Monday, November 26
Canadian Golf & Country Club, 7842 Highway 7
7 to 9 p.m.

Wednesday, November 28
Greely Community Centre, Hall B, 1448 Meadow Dr.
7 to 9 p.m.

Thursday, November 29
Pierce's Corners Hall, 3048 Pierce Rd.
7 to 9 p.m.

Friday, November 30
West Carleton Community Complex, 5670 Carp Rd.
7 to 9 p.m.

For more information on high-speed Internet service, visit xplornet.com or call 1-866-841-6001 or feel free to contact me.

Chris Cope
Executive Director ORCnet
Email: Chris.Cope@ottawa.ca
(613) 580-2424 ext. 28991

QSat Technologies providing one-way satellite Internet service

QSat, a Quebec company, was brought to my attention this week as a company providing one-way satellite
Internet access in the area. One-way satellite uses a satellite link to receive information,
but uses a phone line and modem to upload sent information. This service seems very similar to the
one-way satellite Internet service that Bell Canada used to provide
through ExpressVu, and which it cancelled in 2005. QSat seems to have improved its offering over that of Bell's old offering, in that it supports v.92 modems on the uplink and it is significantly cheaper than Bell's cancelled service. It is unclear if QSat acts as ISP or just provides the infrastructure; Bell's service required a separate ISP.

While it is my opinion that one-way satellite Internet access is inferior to two-way satellite access, the price of QSat's service may be more in line with household budgets than two-way satellite, which tends to be somewhat more expensive.

PCWorld.ca article: Canadian Internet Service Landscape

Here's a link to an interesting article posted on PCWorld.ca about internet services in Canada. It's not really specific to rural access or to Ottawa, but somewhat applicable nonetheless. It is good to know what is typical Internet service in Canada, if only to know what you can reasonably expect in rural areas.

Xplornet Fixed Wireless Review

The following posting came via email from Chris K. near Osgoode, and is posted here with his written permission (note: edited for content and URLs).

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I live on 2nd Line Road and I have resisted the urge to go with Ripnet or Storm and Arryba never was able to get a good enough signal at my house.

Well in August Xplornet put one of their antennas on a local farmer's silo! Not only that it was almost right across the street from me (basically the antenna is about 1.5kms south of Dalmeny Road between 2nd Line Road and Stagecoach). So when I got back from holidays I signed up with Xplornet.

I have to say that so far this has been a mostly pleasant experience. Xplornet uses Digital City for their installations and they were very prompt. Also, Xplornet has refreshingly good tech support--you talk to a real live human being very quickly and I have never been routed to an off-shore call centre--plus the technicians seem to know what they are talking about. One weird thing is that the installers use Cat 5 cable, but they aren't allowed to cut the cable or use shorter lengths, they they looped up about 40ft of cable and left it tied up outside my house.

The Xplornet wireless service uses the Motorola Canopy products which seems to be a robust platform. Installation was free (with a 3 year commitment) and the prices are good with no limits on downloads. For me performance has varied quite a bit since I got the service from outstanding to pretty mediocre--I guess this is normal on shared bandwidth. Most of the time I can measure 2-4 Mb transfer rates using speedtest.net (uploads are pretty consistent and under 400kbps). When things are not going well, I sometimes get speeds of 500-900kbps (this has actually only happened twice), but it's still broadband so I guess I shouldn't complain. Ping times are acceptable for most things.

After 2 years without high speed internet I am pretty darn thrilled to be back in the saddle.

Next step is to get VOIP up and running so I can ditch bell! (My phone lines are the worst I have ever seen).

-Chris K.