Just a few posts and user reviews from around the web about xplornet's sat service with a bit from their current EULA at the end..
Current dialup connection:
5KB/s down, 2-2.5KB/sec up, google.com avg ping: 180-210ms, UT99&Halo 1(PC) lower-end ping(in-game browser): 300-600ms.


eissmann:
"We play WOW and Everquest, and you can expect ping rates of 1800 to 2000 as the usual. You can forget seeing anything in the 3 digit range. A very good day is 1300."


Brad R:
"One more important tip, if you haven't read it already: do not sign up for a three-year contract. Once you are locked in, you are locked in -- you have to pay your contract out in full to terminate."


xplornetbtch:
"I was sold from Anikast to Xplornet. So I did not get it installed by Xplornet.

I had no other choice. I was with DirectPC/Bell. They shut down and I had to buy a new dish and modem and go with Anikast/Telasat/Bell.

I ordered the 500 Down and 100 up package. The package was $54.00 a month.I have yet to sign a contract with Xplornet. I just was transfered over a month ago.It's just a new name on my credit card.

The modem I have with this system is a Surf Beam. This is a KA band system.

When I called to get some new email addresses things seemed to go good. I needed the In/Out codes so I could get them working in Outlook.

The problem with Xplornet is the FAP/Fair Access Policy.

If you use more the the average usage in an hour. The next hour they cut your bandwidth by 25 percent for an hour. So you buy bandwith from Xplornet and you use it. They cut your bandwith down. This sorta defeats the purpose of getting bandwidth.

I ask the Tech guy how much bandwidth can i use before it will be cut back. He tells me It's an average and it changes all the time so I can't give you a number.So you never know when you are useing to much and will get cut back. The record of how many times you have had your bandwidth cut back only goes back a week. I was cut back 7 times over the last week.

Another thing is if you call over slow bandwidth they tell you to do 4 tests on their test site over 24 hours. This is the same site Anikast used. If you don't do the tests over 24 hours they will not let you go up to a level 2 Tech guy. So if you have any bandwith problem it will take a least a day.

The bottom line is I have had this system for 18 months. The seem to do their work on the system from 2 AM until 6 AM Eastern. Every now and then it will be out, but not very often. I would say, It's 98 percent up time over 18 months.

Let me on your luck with Xplornet

I cancelled my Xplornet service Feb 2008.

I had no contract and it was still a pain trying to cancel.

I sent them an email letting them no I was canceling.

3 days later it was still working.

I call them up a the girl goes, anyone could be calling to cancel the service and would not cancel my service until I filled out a form from their web site.

I told her I do not have a printer. So I can't fill out the form. She told me to go to my public library and get a print out there. The closest library to me is 40 K away or 24 miles. I told her thats not happening.

So the next day I sent in a hand written fax notice of cancelation(with no form att).

So a few days later some other girl calls and says, she will let me cancel. But before she trys to get me back by boosting me up to the next package of 1000K down for a few days to check it out. I told her I was at 1000K down until you bought me from Anikast and you cut me back to 500 down. When you go to the 1000K service you get what you paid for with the 500K package and Annikast knew it and boosted me up for free. So I would get what I was suppost to get.

I have had internet service in the Bahamas/Europe/ The Toronto area a few and out in British Columbia.

I have delt with at least 10 Co's over this planet.

Xplornet is buy far the worst Co I have ever had to deal with for a internet connection. They sell you a service for 500 K down and you are lucky to get 200 to 300 K down unless it's 3 AM. Quit a bit of the time you get less than 200K down.

You call Tech and they give you the run around. Like they don't know they have oversold the service and your beam is full. Then I head down to my mail box and I have another flyer for the service.

The service is so oversold they put up another sat for southern/eastern Ont.+ they are putting up wireless towers to make more space on the beams.

I would stay clear of this Co at all costs.

One more sleazy thing they do is. When they sign you up you have 30 days to cancel. They don't FAP you until the 30 days has gone buy. So when you service does not work as it should. You are locked into a contract for 2 or 3 years. I looked at the contract and it is 8 pages long. First of all you need a lawyer to understand it. But the bottom line is everything goes against you. You can't cancel for poor service. If you have to move you are out of luck. If your house burns down they want you to keep paying for the service.

It's an outrage these thieves are still to be in the biz."



sick and tired:
"To whom it may concern:

I went with Xplornet in November of last year and up until April I didn't have too many problems; however, as of about two weeks ago we have been down. I had to call the dispatch people myself. Xplornet has been abusive over the telephone to my daughter and myself. They now state when I call about the problems that we are deemed unserviceable. I find this very hard to believe since we live in a village and there are numerous amounts of customers out here. I can look out my living room window and see all the antennas. Needless to say they will not come out. The dispatch guys I called had to call them in order for me to get any kind of tech support, which by the way states that within 72 hours they will be out here and fix the problem. I am now going on two weeks and they will not give me a refund and they are still taking money out of my account for their service. I called them last night to ask them to hold taking out the payment until the tech support team came out on Monday and the guy told me that he didn't have the authority to do that and (conveniently I might add)that the people in the payment department won't be in until Monday who are capable of making that kind of decision. My next door neighbor is also experiencing the same problem. They will give you excuse after excuse as to why it is my fault. They are now answering my calls with a simple "you are deemed unserviceable" and that ends our call. It is now worse than it has ever been. I am beginning to think that they have already cut me off, without even taking down the equipment and continuing to take my payments out of my bank account. It is funny; however, that I was able to get on here this morning after I called and told them that I was stopping their payments until I got results from their dispatch team. Would I recommend this company? NO, NEVER!!! They seem to know that they have you between a rock and a hard place as we can only get dial-up where we live. I have called numerous other companies and I know that Xplornet knows this. I would have dropped them long ago. Unfortunately, my daughter is on line training with a university and she is in the last two courses in order to graduate and we are just trying to get her through until April of next year. At that time I am going to dump them and go back to dial-up at least they were consistent.
Sincerely,
Sick and Tired of Excuses!!"


jnmontario:     (Wireless connection, not sat.)
"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. "



somethingorother2:
"P2P has issues mostly with the fact it has to connect to several hosts. The surfbeam modem does not deal that great with too many concurrent connections. Somewhere in the settings for your P2P program, there are settings to set the maximum number of concurrent connections. Try putting that at 10, and it should work better. Otherwise it uses most of the bandwidth to try and connect to new hosts. Browsing while downloading will also result in a great loss of transfer speed."



slahm:
"Xplornet uses some of the best(worst) traffic shaping to stop P2P, incoming packets, etc. from their network.

This means that they have firewalls on the ground terminals that analyze the network packets, and figure out if they are part of connections that they want to limit (P2P, incoming http requests, etc), and they send a RST command to whatever is requesting them, which indicates to the NIC(Network card) that the connection is closed. This causes the CARD to drop the connection, rather than Xplornet. So technically, your computer is quitting, rather than them cutting you off. 

Sneaky, eh?"



Installerguy:
"Normaly I wont install a dish on the roof, but when i have had too i do use silicone or latex calking, and i have had modems that have taken 24 hours to lock but they are few and far between. and as to the 30 day good speed and then slow you down, NONE of my customers have complaned about it, as for the ps3 if you are planning on using it for "FPS" type games you are out of luck for the most part the lag will get you killed every time, for anything else call up xplornet and tell them you are using the system for "voip" and you need to be on carrier "a""




Brad R:
"I don't know the technical difference, but I recall being told by tech support that if I wanted to do VoIP I should switch to "A". I don't do VoIP, so I stayed on "B".

At 7:15 this morning my pings to google.com are 885 msec min, 1884 msec max, 1377 msec average."


Installerguy:
"carrier "b" has most ports blocked - setup mostly for surfing and e-mail
carrier "a" is mostly wide open - good for gaming, p2p, and voip
couldnt tell you what his latency is but he sits in the low yell to hi green for ping in wow - good enough he plays on a pvp server"


Talen24:
"Your biggest issue you will run into with any Satellite service is network latency, Telesat wont even look at anything as a latency issue unless there is more then a 5 second delay. that a 5k ping for a gamer.

Average on Satellite is going to run somewhere around 800-2000ms

See if there is a Wireless Provider in your area, latency should be from around 80-400ms"



Command2A:
"My kids use Xbox live on our 1024/256 xplornet package, Gears of War & Halo3 do not work very well, too much latencey. You shoot and seconds later you see the shoot. Call of Duty 3 is not as bad. Overall Satellite Broadband is NOT the way to go for on-line gaming."



somethingorother2:
"Online gaming will not happen very well, if at all with Satellite internet. Different types of satellite internet have differing latencies. Average latency on downstream a would be 600-1200 ms, and on the b downstream, it varies, but ca be as high 2500ms. You would not make very many freinds, and probably would die a lot. WOW will work on dialup, better than satellite. The system has its uses, gaming is not one of them however."



RLTaxJoe:
"Yes, its good for 3 things.
1. Increasing sales of Tylenol, Asprin, Excedrin and any other HEADACHE medicine sold over the counter.
2. Emptying wallets of unsuspecting Canadians, and
3. That dish on the roof makes a nice target for the birds to S**T on.

Other than that, its not very useful at all.  "



angrysquirrel:
"I visited my mother a month ago and they have this service. It is total dogshit for gaming, average ping to google.com for instance is 1700ms.

Compare that to normal cable internet service which runs at 30-40ms and you see the problem.

The data will take way too long to reach the server and return to your computer to make it playable. You will basically be fodder for players and npcs alike and end up booting your computer across the room in a fit of rage.

I shit you not, dial up would probably work better for you."



somersjr:
"I have xplornet have never been satisfied with the service. I'm just waiting for my contract to expire and I'm back to dial-up.

Regarding being "fap"ed. I sent a message to the billing department on a Saturday and explained my discontent. I finished downloading a file (which was downloading at a blazing speed of 3.36 kB/s) on Sunday. After that I turned my computer off and didn't go back on until the following Friday. 

When I checked my email, I had a message from Tech Support telling me that they wanted me to run speed tests. The tech noted that I was FAP'ed that morning..... Tuesday, when my computer wasn't even on.

Go figure. It's not that I'm using the 512 dl speed. I'm now being penalized for possibly thinking about using it.

I have read several of the posts in this forum and can fully understand the frustration expressed by most of the users. I am personally frustrated that I was promised a level of service, then told that the level of service is less then 50% of the amount contracted for, and now with the fair access policy, am able to use the service for less then 15 minutes before my speed is reduced to less then dial-up. 

BTW, I don't use p2p programs, download music or movies or games. My downloading is usually reserved for downloading necessary software updates. When I had dial-up I was able to update all software faster then with Xplornet's service. That's really sad.

Well, enough complaining. I've resigned myself to coast until the contract ends and then hopefully something, with a company with integrity, will come along and give me value for money."








EULA snippet:
"11. EARLY CANCELLATION: For Wireless and Satellite Ka-band customers only, at anytime prior to the 30th day following the activation date of the Service, you may cancel this agreement without further obligation on your part and receive a refund of you initial Fees as well as the cost of the standard installation. In the event of such notification and where you are in possession of Rental Equipment, we shall arrange to have an installer attend at your premises and remove all Rental Equipment and return it to us. No refund shall be paid for damaged Rental Equipment nor for any peripheral items such as reflector dishes, cables, tripods, brackets, poles, etc.

In all other cases, for all Xplornet customers, you agree that if you terminate your subscription to the Services prior to the expiration of the initial term, we have the right, in addition to all other amounts due to us pursuant to these Terms of Service, as liquidated damages and not as penalty, to receive from you the lesser of the two amounts: $25 multiplied by the number of full months remaining in the non-cancelable initial term, as specified on your signed Service Agreement or change of Service Form, or a one time charge of $450."