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 Most ISP’s do not publish their settings as they become unique features of each provider.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