Xplornet Fair Access Policy appears to be changing in 2011

As mentioned by poster FireFox in a comment to my Where is SimplySurf? posting, Xplornet may be making changes to its Fair Access/Traffic Management Policy/ies in early 2011. The changes seem to involve both speed throttling and download caps.

A posting on DSLReports.com provides some info, but I decided to check out what Xplornet has on its website.

I'm an Enhanced Xpress user (3 Mbps down, 3.5 GHz), and when I login to myxplornet, I get the following info on my fair access policy:

Our goal is to ensure that each Xplornet customer receives fair and consistent access to the Internet. A small percentage of customers are responsible for a disproportionate share of data usage on our network. To minimize the impact that heavier users might have on the experience of other Xplornet customers, we have implemented a Fair Access Policy. Our intent with this policy is to affect the fewest customers while helping maintain the best speeds for the majority of customers.

The Fair Access Policy on your service operates only during peak hours (between 8am and 1am local time). During this time, we subject traffic related to applications that are considered non time-sensitive (such as peer-to-peer file sharing, news groups, and online data storage) to a peak transfer speed of 300kbps download and 100kbps upload.

Outside of the Fair Access Policy, the speed you experience on your service is influenced by the design of the equipment. The equipment on your service is designed so that the speed you experience varies on a “per transaction” basis. Each time you begin a new “usage transaction”, such as clicking a link on the web, sending an e-mail, or uploading a file, the initial speed you experience will be the “burst” speed associated with your particular package.

You will continue to experience this burst speed until you reach the “burst limit” for your package. If the transaction isn’t finished when you reach the burst limit, the transaction will be completed at the “Sustained” speed for your package.

Each new usage transaction begins with the burst rate.

During normal web browsing, you will likely find that your transactions are at the burst rate. With larger file downloads/uploads, your transactions will be at a mix of the burst and sustained rates.

They go onto give a table of burst and sustained rates, as well as examples.

For the Xpress service, the throttling info given is:

• Down: Burst: Up to 3.0 Mbps, Burst limit: 3.5 MB, Sustained speed: Up to 700 Kbps
  
• Up: Burst: Up to 600 kbps, Burst limit: 600 KB, Sustained speed: Up to 300 Kbps
  

Basically, for any transaction, once you've downloaded the burst limit at the burst speed, your max speed will be throttled to the sustained speed for the remainder of the transaction.

This is somewhat disturbing. Even though the intention is to throttle heavy users (e.g. people downloading movies or viewing hours of streaming video), the burst limits are so low that they would easily be reached and exceeded in a single transaction.

In the Fair Access Policy that I get, there is no mention of download caps. I'm not sure if caps apply only to satellite users or what.

This all differs from the caps in place by Bell and Rogers, which charge extra if you go over your monthly download cap. Xplornet doesn't seem to be charging extra if you go over-cap, but rather they just slow you down.