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Review by jnmontario 
Posted: 69 days ago
member for 69 days, 36 visits, last login: 8 days ago
 undisclosed location
 Contract price not specified.
 "I have internet"
 "They HEAVILY throttle and block ports"
 "Avoid them if there are any alternatives unless you ONLY surf."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Mail,DNS,News:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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So I got an email from Storm (a great wireless ISP in Ottawa area) a few months ago saying that they'd been bought out by Xplornet. I was a bit trepidatious about it but figured what the heck, can't be all bad. Well, now that I've had Xplornet for 3 days that I can look back on the Garden of Eden and see how green it was. Xplornet's policies SUCK!
I first noticed that my WoW/LOTRO patches as well as ANY service needing non-port 80/21/110 didn't work any longer. When talking to Xplornet CSR's (which always take a min. of 1 hr. on the phone) I was forced to get a static IP which has NOTHING TO DO with port forwarding, yet is their way of charging a premium of $10 extra per customer per month that knows the internet or uses it to its fullest (skype/gaming/torrents/iRC etc...). They simply could have put my NIC in the DMZ and still had dynamic IP addressing and I would have had normal access to the internet.
I sucked it up and got the static IP. Now, utorrent works fine now. WoW / LOTRO patching works fine. Dloading SUSE works fine. Skype works fine.
To boot, They HEAVILY throttle their connection. If you go to speedtest.net you get a rosy picture of xplornet's dl/ul speeds - roughly what they adverse because they burst their data flow for 10-15 seconds at the advertised rates. After this 10-15 seconds the traffic shapers kick in. If you look at sustained dl/ul that you get a good picture of how badly they throttle their connection. I have a '3 Mbps' connection. This should theoretically give me speeds of around 366 kB/s. Their sustained UL/DL speeds are 80-84 kB/s (and I've got a solid signal to noise ratio). After talking to a tech, their 1.5 Mbps service has a sustained cap of 70 KB/s (should be 183 Kb/s) and their 5 Mbps service is capped at sustained 100 KB/s(should be 610 KB/s). To summarize, you get ROUGHLY 1/4 OF THE ADVERTISED SPEED. Their upload rates are even worse - marginally better than dialup - and I'm not joking, but I won't get into that on this post.
For those of you from Storm - or any others looking for a wireless ISP because you're in the boondocks, check out Bell's WiMAX. Do yourself a favour, the Xplornet help desk folk are nice (or at least have been for me) but their policies are DRACONIAN.
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Xplornet
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