Connection SpeedAliant's promised 5mbps Ultra service remains strictly in some dream zone. When I first log on in the morning, my speed averages between 4mbps and 4.9mbps. Absolutely stunning you may say. However, wait until daddy and the kiddies get home from work and school and suddenly speed begins to degrade until, during what I will call peak usage hours, between 6PM and about 11PM, speed will drop as low as .8mbps. During that period each and every day, Aliant is *stealing* about 84% of what I pay them as I'm only getting about 16% of the speed I contracted for. Some twit at their inbound call center actually had the gonads to tell me that this variation in speed was acceptable and that I had agreed to it when I signed on with them.

From what I can determine, Aliant is either shoving overloaded servers down our throats or they have genuine server problems. This can be observed on Speakeasy as you can watch the server stall. If one thinks this is Net congestion, then go to DSL Reports and run the tweak utility. Invariably it will report 1 to 2 second stalling. As well, they will give the cause as peak overload of the server or a faulty server.

I firmly believe that it's about time Aliant was taken to task for this. It is not acceptable and indeed breaches the contract between them and the customer.