Exel (the company that makes the X-Tel) spent years and a lot of money developing the new Xtel range.
This is a simple manufacturing slip-up not a major design fault with the clamps. Basically there has been the lack of glue on the occasional clamp. The fibre glass range is not going to be as tough as it has been designed to be relatively cheap and lightweight. The Hybrid and Carbon Fibre poles are obviously the poles for serious use.
There is an admirable simplicity to the design of these poles and clamps. Bonding a clamp on to the pole is a simple and (usually) very effective way of fixing the clamp. The old method of a plastic peg through a hole in the top of the fibre glass section is by comparison crude. I used to have to regularly re-drill a new hole as the peg would gradually wear the hole until it broke. I was also slightly dubious of the tape method of stopping the section coming out. Having used these poles myself it works very well and is also simple to replace and dismantle. It also allows the sections to be much tighter together thereby giving a smaller diameter.
No pole is perfect! (We have even recently had a client who broke their Facelift!!) Unfortunately the X-Tels have had this minor assembly fault, but otherwise they are proving to be good for the job they have been designed for. I personally would not use the fibre glass range for work above 21ft work, but surprisingly the fibre glass 24ft,28ft 31ft have proved to be extremely popular. Why? because although they are flexible they are a very cheap, user-friendly, and a lightweight way of reaching high windows.
It is interesting that we have no faults with clamp bonding on the Hybrid or Carbon X-Tel range, they must be assembled on a different assembly line.
Another reason that this fault has become remarked upon is that more of these poles have been sold in the UK in the last year (probably) than any other pole. I do not have any exact figures, but I would estimate the figure to be about 4000 poles. This dwarfs the number of Facelift/Omnipole/Tucker/Super-Lite/Unger/Ionics poles that have been sold. We have sold about 600 of these poles and have had about 14 customers who have had the clamps come un-glued this represents only 2.3%.
Having said all of this in the poles/clamps defense, it still annoys me that a simple fault in the factory is causing this problem for us as retailers and for end-users. I have spoken to them about it and hopefully the latest batch we have in stock will have had it rectified.