🚀 go-pugleaf

>   They DO say they're faster though as part of their sales pitch. Then
> when you ask them how they compare to Eastlink's Extreme 15, they say
> NO ONE is that fast. I have speed tests that say they do get that fast
> or very close to it.

In fact the majority of Eastlink Internet users get exactly the rated
speed of the connection (minus a few percent for packet overhead).
Whereas the majority of DSL customers (for any DSL ISP, anywhere on
the planet) get only a fraction of the rated speed. The reason is
simple - even a shoddily installed, age-degraded coax cable is a
pretty good, wideband, low-loss communications medium, whereas even a
perfectly installed, brand new copper telephone pair is pretty crap
for anything above a few Mbit/sec.

There are techniques which push the envelope on how much data you can
get over a copper pair, but the key thing to understand is that these
really are pushing the limits of what's possible. Some places (Korea
famously) offer gigabit-class service over DSL, but that requires high
population density and a DSLAM in every apartment block. Not happening
in Nova Scotia any time soon. Whereas even at 15 Mbit/sec, high speed
Internet is a tiny fraction of the available bandwidth of a coax
cable.

http://www.dslreports.com/archive/eastlink.ca

http://www.dslreports.com/archive/aliant.net

If you compare the results of the two ISPs on the dslreports site,
you'll see that Eastlink users are getting higher average speeds than
Aliant users. No surprise. In fact, if you look at the graphs, most
Eastlink users are getting results higher than 10MBit/sec, whereas no
Aliant user has got a result over 6.5 Mbit/sec.

(Remember Eastlink has customers on 10 and 15 Mbit/sec rated; Aliant
has customers on 1.5, 5 and 10 Mbit/sec rated. Remember also that
network issues between the ISP and the test servers can slow down
results, but not speed them up - so the most interesting results are
the highest ones. Very low results for either ISP should be
discounted.)

It's also worth noting that according to this page:

http://www.dslreports.com/archive

Eastlink is currently the number 4 fastest-rated ISP in North America,
compared to Aliant which is number 79.

In summary:  Eastlink is faster. Their 15Mbit/sec is twice as fast as
Aliant 10Mbit/sec. Who needs maths? :)

Cheers,

Andrew