Xplore to offer faster rural satellite internet, alternative to Starlink after Jupiter 3 launch
Xplore to offer faster rural satellite internet, alternative to Starlink after Jupiter 3 launch
The company said the technology will provide a homegrown alternative to high-speed internet service offered to rural Canadians through SpaceX's Starlink low-earth orbit satellites.
I'm glad that they are geostationary. We don't need more trash in LEO.
Good for space, bad for actual usage.
High latency works alright for some things but for many things real time data rates are needed. A 700ms ping on everything is just not great.
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There's ways to position them in LEO that are sustainable. Geostationary for internet means they're going to be about as useful as dialup for any modern usage. Far too much latency to do even a Zoom call.
Is this the same Xplorenet that charged me double to put in a pole 2x the height so I could get their 25Mbps package, then EXACTLY after the 30 day refund period ended dropped my connection down to 1Mbps, and when I called to complain they told me my satellite isn't getting good enough signal for 25Mbps, and I would need to drop down to their 10Mbps package.
So I dropped down to their 10Mbps to test, because they promised me it would work. When it didn't, I asked for them to return me to their 25Mbps package, to which they replied they can't..
So I had to take months complaining to the CRTC to get my $800 double installation price refunded, and after I did Xplorenet cancelled my internet and blacklisted my address?
And to top it all off, they block windows updates, and the only way to update your computer is to use a VPN to hide your traffic?
Is that the same Xplore? Ya. Good luck. You make Bell and Rogers look like perfect angels.
Unless this has lower latency then rest of the their satellites then its pointless and it’s only a matter of time until they get congested like the rest of them. The higher speed, lower latency and unlimited data was the selling point of starlink so unless their plans are cheap I think starlink will be fine.
Geostationary satellites have high latency. 700 ms latency means it has a minimum of one and a half seconds of delay in a conversation. That's going to make Zoom/Teams/WebEx extremely annoying. It's also going to make online multiplayer gaming impossible.
LEO constellations are really the only option for modern satellite internet. I'm on Starlink but will happily switch back to terrestrial internet once Bell gets fiber to my door. They surveyed my road a few weeks ago so maybe in a couple of years.
There has been a high speed Bell connection just a few kilometres out of range of my neighbourhood for 10 years. After a few years of begging for it to be extended and hearing that it was coming in '3-6 months' I gave up hoping that I would ever have a terrestrial connection.
The end of the fiber coming out of the local CO is in front of the summer home for the rich family from the US. That's about 3 km and a direction bored crossing of a county road and the 416 from my house. The surveyors told me that they were surveying the poles for Bell fiber and they told my neighbor down the road the same thing but added that the fiber construction was not budgeted yet. I think we'll be lucky to see anything happen before the summer of 2025.
Until then, I'm going to stay on StarLink.
I'm on starlink too. Bell recently ran fibre by my front door but I won't be switching when they come knocking. During hurricane Fiona my starlink kept working as long as I gave it power. Bell took 2 months to get out and repair my neighbours downed phone line! If the fibre was in the ground I'd switch, but I don't want my internet coming through 50km of rickety poles along tree lined roads.
This is awful news for exeryone.
Xplornet, now Xplore, are an absolute shit company.
I cannot overstate that.
I was a customer for 7 years before Starlink became available, they promised 25mbps and they gave between 0.2 and 4 (at best).
Their service didn't work when it was cloudy, in my area OR IN NEW BRUNSWICK!!!!!
Every service worked well for about 2-3 weeks before they oversold it and speed dropped.
Gmail would sometimes not have enough bandwidth to load.
GMAIL!!!!
Let alone Youtube, Twitch etc.
Ping was 500ms at best, usually around 700ms.
Gaming was impossible between the ping and bandwidth.
AND THEY WERE A DOLLAR MORE EXPENSIVE A MONTH THAN STARLINK!!!!!!!!
I hate this company, when you googled them the number one result used to be XplornetSucks, a forum for users to vent about how shit the company and its service is.
Probably why they rebranded.
Don't take my word for it, look up a testimonial by anyone who has ever been unfortunate enough to have them as their only option for internet service.
Scraping the bottom of the barrel to give the appearance of availability and competition, and then marking it up so high that you would think it was a luxury service.
Xplore can rot, I'll never forget the thousands of dollars that they took from me, the hours I spent waiting on the phone with customer service, scraping ice and snow off the dish, going to the library when I needed half decent internet even though I was paying Xplornet $150/month, running into their tiny bandwidth caps and having to beg to get an extension so I could work because I had to download some large files or forgot to turn off updates in Steam.
Starlink is cheaper, I can play games again, sometimes I have 3/4 HD streams running at once, uploading actually works, and quickly, I put the dish up ~a year and a half ago and haven't touched it since, the only times it hasn't worked reliably have been during electrical/thunder storms, and even then it still works.
Damn do I hate Xplore.Lol sure they will...sure they will...