The Latest on my Xplornet Service

As previously mentioned (in my comments of my posting of 'Life with Xplornet: After 5 Months'), I was moved over to Xplornet's 3.5 GHz service (from the 900 MHz service) and the host tower was upgraded in late January, after which time my download speeds improved significantly. Part of the speed increase was due to the fact that Xplornet gave me a free upgrade to the 5Mbps service until the end of February due to all the problems that I had between October and January. However, since the beginning of March, my service has been downgraded to the 3Mbps service, and my download speeds dropped accordingly.

Mostly the speeds are good, but sometimes they're poor; to be fair, sometimes they're super. There's a lot of inconsistency, and some days are better or worse than others. On my 3 Mbps service, I'm averaging 1.2 Mbps download through March, which I think is fairly reasonable; as I've said before, I'm not naive enough to expect 3 Mbps all the time. Looking at the details, I've gotten as low as 11 Kbps (yes, Kbps) and as high as 5.1 Mbps for individual downloads. For average daily downloads, I've gotten as high as 2.3 Mbps and as low as 50.39 Kbps. In other words, my speeds are varyingly fast and slow, and I can only guess at the reason or reasons. It might be traffic patterns (i.e. other users, since the bandwidth is shared), backhaul network congestion, target webserver load, atmospheric interference, etc. I work (for now) in the cellular industry, and these are all valid factors for affecting data rates to your web-enabled cellphone or smartphone (e.g. Blackberry), and they also hold true for fixed wireless service (since most are outside the control of the service provider). The ISP owns or controls very little of your end-to-end Internet connection. Equipment could be a factor, both in-home and out on the network. I try my best to keep my PC patch-current and malware-free. And yes, it could be policies implemented by Xplornet, as some people claim.

Remember, peak rate (i.e. the advertised rate -- you'll note that it always reads 'up to' or 'maximum' regardless of the ISP) is NOT the sustained or average rate, and ISPs don't publish their target sustained rates. They're not going to put a guarantee on down- or upload rates either, because of the variety of factors outside of their control that can impact performance. Mostly, it appears to be best effort. The fact that I'm occasionally experiencing download rates above the maximum for my service implies that Xplornet is not (or at least not always) throttling rates. On eight of 16 days in March on which I ran download tests, I got maximum download rates in excess of 3 Mbps.

If you don't think you're regularly getting appropriate speeds, you should complain (and I don't care who you're ISP is). If you're still not satisfied, complain with your wallet, either by downgrading your service (e.g. why pay for 3 Mbps when you're not even regularly getting 1.5 Mbps?) or by switching ISPs (if you have that option).