Rogers to Phase Out Services

[mrpete]

I recieved a letter saying Rogers will phase out cable services and my current TV service will no longer be available. To avoid these impacts move to Rogers ignite.  Is this true?

I don't want ignite!

***Edited Labels***

[Lurker_Returns]

It's happening eventually.

TV over Internet is where the industry is heading and traditional digital cable is going the way of the dodo, like analog TV before it.

As far as I know, Rogers hasn't set a hard cutoff date yet, but that's where the road is heading.

Out of curiosity, is there a hard date in your letter? Or is it just a generalized sales pitch?

[-G-]

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@mrpete wrote:

I recieved a letter saying Rogers will phase out cable services and my current TV service will no longer be available. To avoid these impacts move to Rogers ignite.  Is this true?

I don't want ignite!

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What part of the country do you live in?

I have heard reports that Rogers will be decommissioning legacy/traditional Digital Cable TV infrastructure for former Source Cable customers.  I would also expect this to happen in areas that Rogers upgrades to Fiber to the Home, when they cease to deliver service over coax.  However, as far as I know, Rogers has not announced any plans to sunset Digital Cable just yet.

[-G-]

Found this article in the Hamilton Spectator: https://www.thespec.com/business/2021/04/15/rogers-phasing-out-source-cable-service.html

According to the report, the affected customers have until mid-May to upgrade to Ignite to avoid a gap in service.

[mrpete]

It states starting on May 15 2021 some of your existing TV features MAY be impacted, including the loss of your channel guide and ability to view some channels.

[Don_Ca]

Are you a former Source Cable or Mountain Cable customer? Also, come to the Dark Side, we have pizza 😉 Ignite is good for me, better than the old half backed software running on legacy.

[THam]

Hello,

I and others in my neighbourhood (in the Hamilton Mountain area) have been experiencing random outages since mid-March of this year. Up until today, I've been told there is a problem in my area that has been difficult to fix but they're working on it. However, today a technician and then an order-entry (?) person let the truth slip:

1. The ignite service I am currently subscribed to is not a suitable deployment for my area due to the number of users
2. This is the cause of the repeated outages
3. I can stay with the service and continue experiencing outages or move to the "upgraded" Ignite service which costs more but will be outage-free

I pointed out that I've been paying for an outage-free service and it doesn't make sense to have a customer pay more because the vendor can't make the current service work properly.

@Rogers: What is going on here? Can you understand that this just looks like a way to extract more money from your customers? The solution is simple: If you can't make your current service work properly, move us to the new service at no extra cost.

Now, can you please help me finally be free of these ridiculous outages?

[Don_Ca]

Sounds like they do not have the capacity in the area to handle the load.

[Pauly]

This happens all the time, planned obsolesce.

The Digital cable you watch on your TV comes from Rogers, but Rogers did not invent the technology, other companies invented and build the equipment to transmit the signals from the Head End to your house. That equipment has been around for quite a long time and its likely at its end of life span. This means the vendors do not produce new equipment anymore, there's no support, and stuff that is being decommissioned in the field is being replaced by another vendor which uses a newer different technology (IPTV).

Basically if u want to continue watching TV you have to switch to the Ignite system.

This is not new thing, this happens to everything remember cash registers were all manual back in the day, ya they got obsolete and replaced with computers. Cellphones? they were all analog, they got replaced and moved over to a digital technology. Audio Cassettes? ya those got replaced with CDs and eventually digital downloads.

[-G-]

Looks like we have some posts that got merged into an existing thread, but the common theme here are issues affecting former customers of small regional cable companies that were acquired by Rogers.  I'm also almost certain that these Digital Cable customers do not have Scientific Atlanta/Cisco/Technicolor cable boxes so, at some point, aging, obsolete and incompatible infrastructure in these service areas will need to get replaced with current technology.