I don't know that to make of the letter that got sent out to all Rogers customers yesterday, or the ones prior to that, or any of the other public statements that Rogers has made to date.
First of all, Rogers' explanation for what I call the "Massive Meltdown of 2022" doesn't really make sense. There's either a lot more to what happened than what they are willing to admit and/or their network was far more fragile (and more poorly designed and more poorly implemented and more poorly managed) than I (or anybody) could have possibly ever imagined.
That $10 billion figure is just a round number that they put out into the air. They can significantly improve the reliability and availability of their existing network for only a small fraction of that amount. They are also, almost certainly, still in the very early stages of engaging with vendors and consultants to develop plans going forward.
The reality is that for the past several years, Rogers has underinvested in their network and needs to invest significant funds to remain competitive with Bell FTTH. They need to dump legacy infrastructure and service offerings that are no longer supportable, mothball their cable & DOCSIS infrastructure, and enhance and upgrade their access networks to support FTTH and future expansion of their mobile infrastructure to support 5G and beyond, and do it properly to improve reliability and availability for all customers. (They should probably also revisit the business relationships that they have with ALL of their current vendors and partners.). I would hope that a significant part of that $10 billion was already earmarked for those upgrades and that they are just putting a different spin on this in light of recent events.
@Messor_Animae wrote:
Ignite Home Phone is not capable of being reliable for dependable 911 service, no battery backup of Ignite internet modem's power and it uses the internet which is unreliable.
Put your Ignite gateway on a UPS and you'll have the same uptime in a power outage as legacy Rogers home phone. Comcast has also designed a battery that keeps voice service up and running on the XB6 and XB7 gateways. The problem is that Rogers doesn't keep the batteries maintained in their local nodes. When they run down, it won't matter whether or not the Rogers telephone modem (whatever flavour it may me) has power; the equipment that it needs to talk to on the network will quickly run out of backup power after a power outage. (True story: I saw a contractor replacing the batteries in the node close to my home. I was told that I must have a Rogers VIP in my neighbourhood because those batteries hardly ever get replaced anymore.)
Bell is not much better these days. Once upon a time, with the legacy POTS service, battery and dial tone on a telephone line were provided by equipment in a central office, that were backed up by a huge bank of batteries. You had 5-nines (99.999%) availability. Now, dial tone is typically provided by a remote CO (that may only have limited backup power) or by a VoIP telephone adapter in the Bell Home Hub modem, that also talks to equipment in the neighbourhood with limited backup power.
Today, if you need a telephone (or Internet) service that can remain up during a power outage, your best option is a cell phone.
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