Xplornet review

Swifty · 23 Mar 2010

Xplornet the worst internet.

Well where do I begin with this review, the title basically says it all but I will go into further detail with this company and hopefully to stop people from around the world from signing onto this company. The company is owned by Barrett Corporation. Xplornet has been around for 8 years and what a terrible 8 years it is for them.

Xplornet offers two different types of Internet to their customers.

Satellite
Wireless

and usually people in rural area's get this internet because it is the only service provided in their communities because there is no competition for Xplornet they snatch up unsuspecting customers. But in reality if you are willing to fish up $800 for them to install a satellite and then $40-$50 a month and then they might even lock you into a 3 year contract with them and if you even want to think about throwing their equipment onto your drive way and phone them and tell them that it is on the drive way come get it. You have to pay $300. So I suggest you never think about Satellite it is a terrible technology for Internet.

Wireless on the other hand is a cheaper way to use their service but is probably just as bad, now considering you live in a rural area the tree's are going to be in the way for the tower to even pick up signal so they either put it up on a J arm or they come over with drills and drill it onto the roof and what a nasty site it is having an antenna on your roof it looks like your from NASA.

They are very misleading with their internet speeds they tell you that you are receiving 5mb which costs about 60 bucks a month but in reality they tell you that you can only receive 80 percent of that, but even then they are lying to you because you don't even get that.

Now they have something called the Fair Access Policy (FAP) which gives them the right to completely take your internet speed away for hours if you use too much bandwidth. Now in their ad's they clearly state that you get unlimited bandwidth. Another lie from xplornet.

Customer Service

Now I am pretty sure for the most part every customer service has their downfalls but there is no question about it Xplornet's customer service is so bad you may even laugh on the phone while trying to take them seriously. When you call to report a problem and ask for assistance the first thing they will tell you is "Well I have checked your signal and it is fine" and they will do everything avoid blaming themselves for the problems, and I am sure some of the customer agents feel bad for their customers. And even sometimes they will tell you that you are restricted to gain access to your own account information because you could be posing as the customer(you). And after you make the first call your internet speed will increase for several hours then it will head straight back down to rock bottom.

Now I have looked around and there are so many complaints even from 2008, it seems like that is when the most complaints started coming in because they had started to downgrade their service that year. And many calls have been made to the company but nothing has been done.

And if any one has heard of Hughesnet, xplornet can be considered a brother company to them. But they had been sued for poor service just last year, the only reason the law suit was put forward was because of the customers complaints if you want to read more here is a link:

HughesNet Sued For Poor Service - After our users have complained for years... - dslreports.com

Personal experience

I am a victim of this terrible service and I feel like I have run around like a chicken with its head cut off. I had made several threads on different websites because I thought it had been my step sister downloading too much. But simply I was wrong I have decided to do some more research about this company and I had discovered their dirty secrets. I am used to such poor treatment from companies these days. But over the 2 months of actually using their service I am so disappointed beyond disbelief, It was nothing compared to my old internet service provider. I get frustrated when It comes down to the fact I need to do my homework or if I want to leisurely play xbox live or any online game and I can't even do that because the company is throttling me. and it is even worse because I went on speedtest.net and these are my results:

Apparently I am supposed to be getting 2.5mb but that is clearly what I am getting that is about right 60-75 percent of what I should be getting.

Once I move out this summer I am completely ridding of Xplornet from my life and I would advise every one else to do so as well.

I hope this will help many people when deciding which internet to choose, this is not the one to go with you would be better with dial up.

Swifty · 29 Jul 2010

Sorry bumping for the sake of people knowing.

Mikeb1 · 07 Aug 2010

I live in a rural area in Southern Ontario, Canada - with not very many internet options available to me. I at one point had been using dialup for longer than i care to admit because living out here has and still puts a limit on what's available to me.

Sadly I know exactly what you're talking about. I've been with xplornet for probably around four years now, and they have proven to be an astronomical disappointment and frustration at every turn. In all honesty, i would love for my biggest problem with them to be receiving 50-75% of the service my $50/month entitles me to. If they're not just completely down (no service whatsoever) - which usually happens weekly, and can persist for many hours if not days, the speed hovers around a crawling pace, and "hiccups" causing 5-10 second disconnects almost hourly. Playing video games? Impossible, not on this - unless you like getting booted every 20 minutes and playing in latency typically around 900+ ms. Downloading anything without a download manager is a complete and utter exercise in futility, as anything that takes over 10 minutes (not hard when you're downloading at 30-50 kb/s) will drop along with the regular hiccups in service.

I mean, I can understand days, possibly weeks, of VERY sparse disruption in internet service - that would happen with anything. Technical issues are bound to come up, and adjustments are normal with companies that legitimately try and repair/improve their service hardware. However, i can say that generally Xplornet has provided subpar service the entire time I've been with them, and completely unusable, frusterating service far too often to dismiss as a simple technical issue.

I've called their "customer support" many times over the years. Still after all of the calls and absolutely zero help, my favorite response (to: "why is the service i pay for terrible?") was; "We have birds nesting in our equipment right now". Yes, some lady actually said that to me, and i laughed right on the phone at her. After apologizing i politely hung up scratching my head. At this point i always sigh before i call them. I actually even spend some time wondering if it's even worth it, because you literally cannot call that "customer support" with what they offer you.

Let me say that I'm not a nut who calls and says "fix my internet. i have no idea what's wrong but i guarantee you it's not me, it's something on your end. fix it now or i will discontinue business with you". I have fully and completely followed every step and direction (as silly as they sound when you're talking to them) to a T. A service call will always begin with a verification of identity. Lord forbid someone else calls impersonating you, trying to thief your identity in (obviously) the most efficient way possible. Once they decide you are you, they may begin divulging extremely confidential information, such as: Status of connection; Speed of connection; Location of the tower in question; History of previous calls/complaints, etc etc. They will instruct you to unplug your internet cable, along with your router, to monitor connection to the tower (this is the generic response and in my four years of business has been the ONLY response I've gotten that may actually address my service, even if it never does) - then plug them back in. After this, two things may happen;

1) You connect to their tower (as they see acceptable), and whatever the original complaint was (low speed, dropping connection frequently, long periods of no service, etc) is not immediately dealt with. They request for you to make "patterns" by calling in daily, or every other day when you have a problem with service, so that they may document your complaints and more easily "connect the dots" to find a servicable problem. The issue with this is - you never stop patterning, and they NEVER offer you a real solution.

2) You don't connect, and they feed you some ridiculous excuse. I've had several, most usually involve my router (which I've tested with three seperate ones over the years), some involve the weather (even when there's not a cloud in the sky and you couldn't ask for a clearer day), and once i had someone actually admit that nobody was connected to my tower and there *may* have been a technical problem (this never resolved and problems continued to persist). The end result of this is the same as the previous; You need to call and make a pattern over the course of weeks to establish a diary so that they can help you.

How they can call this customer service is totally beyond me. They don't offer any help whatsoever, and they put the owness completely on you to make this diary pattern that no normal person can legitimately make if they have a job, responsibilities, and things to attend to. The end result is; your service issues are never addressed.

None of my personal experiences even mention the inate problems with satellite/wireless service in general. The Fair Access Policy that xplornet uses (during periods of semi-acceptable service) ensures that you are never able to stay on for extended periods of time, and that all of your downloads and large tasks ultimately fail after a predetermined amount of time, because you are taking too much bandwidth. Along with the fact that they're WAY OVER capacity on a per-tower basis, and cannot even begin to offer services to match what you're paying for - although this doesn't stop them from advertizing it as such.

In all of my calls and complaints they have never once offered to send someone out here to investigate or help. They legitimize the lack of (or absense of) service with standardized responses that do nothing but try and cloud the fact that they are over capacity, or refer to the TOS and the fact that you are never actually guaranteed service at any time.

Right now my service is terrible. There are times in the early morning where i can connect/use the internet, but any time that doesn't fall between 4:00 am and 11:00 am is out of the question in terms of internet use.

Overall I'm extremely displeased with Xplornet and would urge anyone who is considering it to weigh their options and consider if they are is ready for the massive headache they're about to subject themself to. I myself am so bummed out about satellite internet in general - which is the reason I'm hesitant to switch service to something similar like Hughesnet or Wave Direct. Dialup is a poor alternative, so at this point my only viable option is to move. LOL - nice thanks. Can i please sell my house, pay off my ridiculous mortgage, and move into a shack in the city so i can access decent internet?

TL;DR- Xplornet service is not good (almost doesn't exist). Their customer support is even worse.