Welcome to the self-proclaimed
Rural Ottawa High-Speed Internet Blog. High-speed Internet access is virtually
ubiquitous in the urban and suburban areas of Ottawa, but when I started this blog in 2005, only about 60% of the
rural areas of Ottawa have coverage.
However, even for rural citizens, high-speed Internet access is becoming as necessary as telephone service.
Happily, high-speed coverage for rural Ottawa has increased significantly, and not only is coverage
reportedly
above 90%, many rural residents and businesses now have more than one choice of high-speed ISP.
This purpose of this weblog is to track news and events related to high-speed (broadband) Internet access in the
rural areas of Ottawa and, to a lesser extent, in nearby townships.
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Article: Xplornet Announces Plan to Deliver 25 Mbps Broadband Internet to 100% of Rural Canadians
23 Comments:
Rural west Ottawa here.
I wonder what the actual speed will be.
Seeing how the 5Mbps WiMax service actually gives real world speeds of about 1Mbps. (outside of mid-day or middle of night)
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4312471506
http://testmy.net/db/Hq068C7V
This is great news... except for the fact that my neighbour just got it and tested his speeds at 4mbps. He was previously on their 10mbps package and was getting 2, so he's quite happy with the doubling in speed but let's face it, when they advertise up to 25mbps, you'd expect that a majority of the time you're at least getting close to that.
Focus less on speeds and more on end-user experience. That said, faster speeds will likely result in better end-user experience as data-hungry users download more and more.
I wonder if Xplornet's 25 Mbps service will be throttled LTE. I have LTE on my corporate smartphone (on the Rogers net) and have gotten download speeds in excess of 40 Mbps.
sadly I decided to signup to xplornet, the sale person worked hard convincing me that things have changed, the service is better and "No we don't over load the network anymore that was the old 900 service" statement.
So I signed up for the 10Meg 175GB in the hopes I would get somewhere in the neighbourhood of 4-5 Meg in the evening, you know enough to watch Netflix maybe browse the web at the same time.
Boy was that person every wrong... the only time I get better than 3Meg service is the middle of the day... you know that time when no one is around, even then I only get around 3.5-4.5 Meg. I the evening good luck loading a web page, I tried to log a ticket with xplornet regarding the really terrible speeds. Took me 10-15 mins to just get that logged. I could not even open an SSH connection to a server and Netflix even on the lowest setting is still buffering.
Thank god I am within the first 30 days, this is ridiculous... Back to slow but at least consistent DSL.
The LTE Service should be faster... but for how long... how long until they over load that service 3months, 6months... who knows.
All the wonderful announcements about the wonderful high speed wireless internet in rural Ottawa are masking the issue that Xplornet is not delivering to customers what they are promising in the news.
I installed Xplornet 4G 10/1 internet in February. It worked great for a couple of weeks, then I started having issues. It started slowing to about 1 Mb speeds at intervals during the day and at peak times. My wife works from home on a VPN, and this causes here VPN to drop connection - therefore the internet service does not meet our needs, and we are at 10% of the service we are paying for.
Xplornet just put LTE 10/1,25/1 through our area, so I just upgraded to the LTE 10/1 hoping for an improvement as they promised. Well, again, it worked great for a couple of weeks, about double the speed I was getting with 4G and half the ping speed, but then it also slowed to a crawl. Now the LTE is WORSE than the 4G, and I have been getting 0.4 Mbps during the day and from 5pm to 10pm at night. This is so slow my wife cannot work from home and we cannot open anything other than email.
I've contacted Xplornet, and of course they're telling me to keep unplugging my modem and router, which does nothing. I am planning to install Storm 4G internet now as they are promising me that their 'peak time' speed is still 6 or 7 Mbps. I don't believe them at all, but this is literally the last choice I have.
I am also planning to contact my MLA and start the discussion to try and show that this wireless internet is NOT providing residential customers with high speed internet. We need Fibre Op, plain and simple.
I've just signed up for the LTE 25 service. I'm in the Ashton area pointing toward the barn silos on Hwy 7 before Carleton Place. My down speed tests at about 23.6 during an 8am test and about 22.8 during a 7pm test. Upload was 1.38 in the morning and .68 in the evening. This was real world testing over a two day period. If I get back here I'll post some more speed test results. I jokingly asked the installer what happens after my first 30 days (in reference to throttling). He just smiled.
For now I can stream in HD, play on the computer, and do other "normal" things. The cost is outrages, but they know users will pay who want decent speeds.
I had a site survey done by Storm but I may not be close enough to their tower; I have to talk to them next week.
Xplornet said my low speeds on my LTE 10 (0.4 Mbps during anything close to peak times) were due to my antenna being wooded by trees. Just had a 10' mast installed today, which made the signal steady, but surprise surprise, speed is still 0.4 Mbps.
Now they are saying that the installer didn't get the antenna aimed just right and are planning to have them come back and re-aim it. I am not buying that that's the problem.
I am hoping to switch to Storm. I grilled them about how slow the speed would be during peak times, and they are all adamant that for 10 Mbps service, I would never see less than 6-8 Mbps. That's more than I've ever seen on the Xplornet LTE 10. Storm told me point blank that they do not oversell their service so that they can provide customers with the speed they promise. This is the issue with Xplornet, they are overselling their service to 5x capacity, so everyone's speeds are at a crawl.
I live 20 minutes from the Parliament buildings, and I cannot get reliable internet - ridiculous.
I signed up for the new Xplornet LTE service with 250GB. Getting the 25Mbps speed is a waste of time as even with the 10Mbps there are still extreme slowdowns during peak times (it varies from unusable to passable, but well below advertised speeds). Outside of peak times performance is as expected... 10 down for me and 1Mbps up. I'm connected to the Metcalfe tower.
We're using the Rogers Rocket Hub. It has improved since we moved here 5 years ago, but it's still not reliable or stable enough to use Netflix or stream anything. We are paying a lot of money for this, but I certainly don't think we're getting the service we deserve for that money.
Has anyone tried NorthWind? It's been in the area for a while now, but we're afraid to try it.
Why can't these providers give a minimum guarantee? What is so difficult about supplying us with decent high speed service? This isn't the wilderness.
Not sure if anyone else has noticed but the new McGee Meadows off of William Mooney is getting Fiber to the house from Bell and Rogers. My neighbor talked with the Bell installer and he gave us a number because Bell is running this right past our street (Canterberry Woods) and when we called them we were told that we were not on the list to get anything in the near future. Which is brutal considering they had to go past us to get to the new development.
Argh!! The fact William Mooney is getting fiber and I'm about 2km away and can't even get DSL is brutal for sure. Bell's website and one of their internal databases actually started saying my address qualified for ADSL so I ordered, 2 days later they cancel it because there was an error on their side. Stuck with Rocket Hub and a ridiculously low cap. Teksavvy actually offers a wireless service at 10Mbps and unlimited but only in Chatham-Kent region. I'm ok with paying above city rates for the internet, but double the price for 10% of the value is too much when a nightly walk goes by someone with fiber.
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Re: xPlornet Not Oversubscribing their LTE stuff:
Assuming they are running the same LTE gear that we are (which I'm 99.99% sure they are); by that manufacturer's current Spec. LTE offers 100Mbps down per sector in 2x2 on a single carrier, 20Mhz channel. 200Mbps is coming in Q4 this year. So if xPlornet is truly not oversubbing their LTE equipment they have 4 customers on a single Sector (antenna). That Sector with an eNodeB (radio) costs about $10K. $89 x 4 (customers if not oversubbed)=$356/month revenue from that sector. I somehow doubt that xPlornet would spend over 10K to enable less that $400 per month in *Gross* revenue, so that claim may be a tad bit incorrect.
I have, however, seen screen shots of a NMS showing 185 LTE clients connected to a single eNodeB in the Spencerville area. Since Storm and JCIS are not yet doing LTE (at least as far as I know) I would assume (and I may be wrong) that is an xPlornet deployment, and if so that might be closer to their reality.
But that would be a little insane... so more likely(?) they have 100 to 150 subs per sector, averaging maybe 10Mbps sold per sub, so about 1.25Gbps sold vs. 100Mbps available (that's assuming that you're filling 100% of your AirRate - which is typically impossible BTW). Give them the benefit of the doubt and say Roughly 12:1 oversub; much better than the over 50:1 they were trying to get away with on the Canopy gear they started with, but still more than triple what the rest of us aim for in a NetFlix world.
So, while modulation plays a part (e.g. if you're burried in trees with an CINR of 24 you probably won't see better than 7Mbps anyways), it more than likely comes down to the Sector you're on. If you *are* getting 25Mbps most of the time then you're on lightly loaded sector, but if you're only getting 5 then there's no point in paying for 25 because you may never see it due to overloading.
Cheers,
Ian
BTW, I signed up for Xplornet's 25 Mbps service about a month ago. It's been pretty fast, but when tested, the download speeds are all over the map. As I write this, I'm getting ~3.5 Mbps down, but I think my kids are also downloading on their computers and tablets, so my current result is skewed. I have also gotten over 20 Mbps down. More typically, I've been getting 10-12 Mbps down. I'm homed to the Metcalfe tower, which is ~19km away.
Uploading is fairly consistent: 750 Kbps - 1 Mbps.
Depending on how things go, I may ask them to re-home my antenna to the North Gower tower when they upgrade it. I may also downgrade to the 10 Mbps service if they can't maintain speeds above 10 Mbps on my 25 Mbps service.
All this said, we regularly watch Netflix and Sony/Playstation movies skip-free. I play online real-time games (e.g. World of Tanks) where ping-time is *everything*, and I'm routinely getting well below 100ms, which is excellent (on their old 3G service, pings of ~150ms were typical). I occasionally work from home, and have no issues, even when downloading large files.
-Chris
Yup it's a question of Capacity and over subscription. They are catching on after... how long has it been since they bought Storm's rural Res. ?? 8 Years ?
BTW: LTE appears to be most efficient when you limit upload to 1Mbps per customer, maximizing the downlink air time. In this config, it is very predictable bandwidth if the eNodeB is not ridiculously oversubscribed. LTE 25x2, http://www.speedtest.net/result/4481202261.png)Of course with any Flash based speed test you get some weirdness - this is not actually - we cap the sub at 25Mbps) http://www.speedtest.net/result/4481195031.png The tower is 4Km. The LTE Sector is not heavily loaded so Speeds are very consistent.... of course there's less money to be made in being consistent than being heavily over-subbed ;-)
IMHO If you need something symmetrical, or even just more than 2Mbps Up you're better off with FDD or a hybrid TDMA. http://www.speedtest.net/result/4481222132.png
Ian
I am located in Stittsville/Carp area and am currently on LTE25 (and have been for ~6 months). Previous to LTE, I was on the Wimax 'Extreme' plan. LTE was good for a few months - ping time was averaging 50ms and speeds were close enough to the rated 25 down and 1 up for me to be 'satisfied' (although still frustrated that I'm paying triple that of people 2 km away on Rogers or Bell's high speed). The last month and a half, however, has been hell. Ping times are all over the map - but have now been hovering around 200ms and, at times, over 900ms. Web pages are failing to resolve, bandwidth has started to crawl around 1 Mbps. Even Xplornet representatives are ticked off with Xplornet, and openly telling customers (me) that the service has been oversold, the backbone supplying the towers is underrated for the amount of subscribers.
To top it all off, the 'wireless canopy' that Xplornet uses is VERY insecure. Essentially its a massive Wifi LAN and you can see and connect to EVERY SUBSCRIBER/CUSTOMER that's on the same tower as you.
VERY UNHAPPY WITH XPLORNET - ESPECIALLY FOR THE $100/Month that I pay them
Storm for a couple of years here. Just outside of Ashton.
$75 + $10 per month for 10 down, 1 up. 99.99% uptime. 99.99% of the time getting almost 100% of the speed - there are no peak times. 25 to 65ms ping times most of the time, with an occasional spike to 100ms.
VOIP works great (with voip.ms !).
The moment speed degrades, they obviously fix it immediately, because the speed gets back to 100% very quickly. Apparently they have great monitoring software for this, and act on it right away. Evidence so far shows they weren't kidding.
It's been like this consistently for the two years we've been with them.
The challenge now is to get the router to slow down the bandwidth to all those tablets kicking around the house, and to keep the bandwidth under 150GB.
Well I signed up to xplornet back in August, 10 Meg LTE is all I could apparently the signal was to strong to get 25 Meg. Speeds were great until this last 2-3 weeks. During the day is great 10 Meg almost all the time 20ms ping to various Montreal & Toronto locations. In the evening... that is another story, what was once the odd drop to 50-60 ms ping is now 200+ms and what was a drop to 7-8Meg is now bouncing around the 1.5 to 3 Meg.
When I signed up I assumed this would happen, but my assumption was it would be 6-9 months before the service would get to mostly unusable for anything other than browsing and email. Now gaming is a no go, streaming Netflix leads to constant buffering and Plex... good luck. I have gone from irritated to actually pissed in a matter of a couple weeks... because I knew better, but I fell into the trap the promises of faster speeds, bigger pipes and no... no... we learned from our mistakes we won't over load the canopy.
Don't fall into the trap, unless you have no other option... honestly Dialup might be a better solution.
Good job I kept the slow but consistent DSL connection...
A follow-up to my June posting my Xplornet 25M service. Connection speed has fallen off the map (just about). I was waiting for this and it finally arrived. Prime time weekday speeds are now running about 1.2meg to 2.4meg and pings well beyond 150ms(regularly). Certainly not enough to do any kind of streaming and is now impacting my OOMA. Sure, Sunday morning at 7am I can get full speed. I take advantage of that to try and download my programs to watch later. But forget doing live streaming. This all happening after several weeks of autonomous phone calls about service disruptions while they were "improving" services. This is not worth paying $100/mo for. I may as well downgrade the service and save a few bucks. As Lars mentioned, dial-up may be a better option, at least a stable, option. Oh will the rural people ever catch a break?
Well thought I would check in... May 1st 2016 now and I spend most of time running on a Teksavvy 3 Meg DSL connection now because I get more stability from it...
Xplornet is now completely useless from about ~5:30 to ~11:30 every evening, pings are now landing around the ~1000ms, Speed somewhere in the 0.5Meg to 3Meg but so unreliable nothing can be done. Youtube, Netflix, Shomi really any streaming service is absolutely a no go. We get 10-15 seconds of somewhat grainy picture followed by 20-30sec of buffering please wait. Browsing the web and getting email is still somewhat ok, but if the site has any multimedia on it your pooched again.
We have had the techs out here to realign the radio more times than my parents have visited since getting the service. We are now just waiting for the contract to be up and we can cancel without penalty. I am so disappointed and frustrated that I fell into the trap of promises again, nothing has changed and service is now worse then is was in the 4G towers.
I have discussed this with our counsellor but he just blows us all off telling us we get excellent service provided by Barrett Xplornet. I have tried to explain the issues and its like I am talking greek, the guy lives in Kanata and has really no idea what kind of service xplornet is providing.
I live about 5Km's from Roger Cable 250Meg service and 1KM from 1Gig fibre cable... someday we will be provided decent service.
I am truly a disappointed West Carleton resident
Don't feel bad folks. I am still on a canopy setup and been told I can be upgraded to LTE due to being in a dark zone which is BS as far as I am concerned; Plus tried to get Wimax, but they said the tower is no longer accepting new customers but yet, it is the same tower that has the LTE service. Here is the best....My neighbour is roughly 30 feet away and has Wimax service and is able to get the LTE service.
Someone tell me I am not being scammed by these guys. I pay $81.00 a month for a burst signal of 3 MB which drops to less than 800 KBs.
After seeing this article and them saying 100% of their customers will have LTE service by 2017, it will be interesting to see if I will get the service.
Note: I have sent a complaint to the CCTS and nothing was done, so if anyone has any more ideas that may help me, it would be greatly appreciated. I have tired every other ISP and they are not yet able to provide their service at this time.
FYI, The city of ottawa has an exclusive contract with Xplornet, to bring "high speed" internet to rural ottawa, that clearly not doing, but the the counselors are so busy with center town that all the rest of ottawa gets neglected, i wonder if they even know the horrible service Xplodenet (not a type-o) are offering for that exclusive contract they are getting.
I wonder if they even care about us rural folks?
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