Hi everyone. Recently, Rogers announced its 2018 annual report and it outlines details about investments on the cable front. This report confirms several of our suspicions of Rogers' action plan to improve their network and reliability in the last year and in the years ahead. Hopefully this post clearly outlines the investments Rogers is taking to improve its network.
1. In the last year, customers in select neighborhoods received a massive bandwidth uplift through network segmentation. This reduces the number of homes passed per node by adding more fibre nodes in the neighborhood. More on the customer experience from this upgrade can be read here.
- In Rogers' 2018 annual report, they state that the latter is all part of the plan to "uplift our HFC network to 1.2GHz". That is right, Rogers is preparing their network for the use of frequencies higher than the current 860MHz.
- As a part of uplifting the network to 1.2GHz, they are also planning to improve network performance and reliability by deploying digital fibre optics, removing RF amplifiers, and reducing the number of homes passed per node to an average of 60.
- 1.2GHz will increase bandwidth capacity per customer as Rogers will enable additional upstream and downstream frequencies under DOCSIS 3.1.
2. In 2018, Rogers began to upgrade their HFC network to a mix of 1.2GHz FTTC and and FTTH.
- 1.2GHz FTTC lays the foundation for Remote-PHY and Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX).
- Interestingly, Rogers' fibre to the home approach is based on XGS-PON.
3. Investments are also being made on the TV front:
- video signal compression will be improved as they migrate to advanced compression protocols (H.265+)
- switch digital video will be implemented to meet channel and on-demand capacity
