Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Rogers Internet – A quick singing of the praises …

I had a network interruption this morning where the little “not connected to Internet” decorator popped up on the signal strength icon in the task bar, indicating that somewhere along the chain we lost connectivity with the world. (Oh no!)

Simultaneously, my laptop disconnected from the remote desktop session in which it was displayed, indicating that this was more than just a simple DNS issue in the network.

So I rebooted both devices in the Internet chain … unplug the router in the living room – yes, I ran 50 foot cables to and from the demarcation so that I could place the router in the exact center of the house, giving every corner fantastic signal strength – and then unplug the cable modem in the basement. Wait 30 seconds and plug them back in in reverse.

I got upstairs after a few minutes doing a small task downstairs and everything was running smoothly again …

But I was not prepared for the amazing speeds I got … the final speed of 75Mbps is simply amazing when you consider that it is far above the level I am paying for. Rogers, in this area, is giving great value for money (don’t get me started on cell phone charges though) … and this does not even show the real-time speed graph, where the first half of the test ran at 100Mbps+, a speed I have never seen before.

By contrast …

The rewiring of the family home in Winnipeg by MTS has gone very well, and they get within 10% of the top speed available in their neighbourhood. That being 20Mbps … they are getting about 18Mbps … not bad, but you can see the difference in technologies at play here. I think Rogers is in a class by itself.

I am still tempted to take advantage of Bell’s amazing offers for Fibe TV and Internet, but I am held back by the same issues they have in MTS. Their technology is limited such that the best speeds I can get in my neighbourhood are 25 down and 10 up. While I  would like to get the 10Mbps upload speeds, dropping back to 25Mbps is not in the cards. Sorry Bell, but until you can match Rogers in my neighbourhood (and since it is not in Toronto, that is not going to happen :-)) I will be staying with the speed kings … (And one other thing … I cannot find Rogers One sports network on the Bell Fibe TV listings … and that will never fly in this house :-))