Suggestion for a New Board Regarding Potential Ignite Customers Needing Answers Before Switching

[dougjp]

Perhaps I haven't figured out Forum properly, however I find myself bouncing around from one board to another to get partial answers/conflicting answers/far too technical answers to understand for the 'average' person (extremely frustrating). This is because the Boards are product specific, there is no overall package 'home setup' board, and most people are talking to other techies.

What I had in mind was a Board for Rogers home customers who have the digital package - non-Ignite phone, Cable TV and Internet, who are considering all or part of the Ignite package. They want to know if their specific current setup can be made to work with Ignite without losing any of their existing conveniences, and exactly how to set it up to be the most reliable possible. And find out problems before switching.

[-G-]

@dougjp  You are not alone.  I think that there are plenty of other people that are in your situation, who face some potential installation challenges that are not overly complex to resolve, but that may be beyond your ability to resolve yourself when performing a self-install.

With the Ignite XB6 gateway being an all-in-one device, this can make things easier for some and more challenging for others.  Connecting the telephone port to your in-home telephone wiring will be easier if the XB6 is located in the basement.  (and additional things also need to be considered if you have a home alarm system that needs to use the telephone to call into the alarm company's central station.)  However, in order to get the best WiFi performance, it is typically best if the Ignite gateway is located in the main living space.

In the early days of Ignite TV, you had to pay a $150 installation fee.  However, you also got the benefit of being able to consult with an Ignite TV Concierge, who could answer questions about the Ignite portfolio of services.  You could also discuss potential installation challenges that are specific to your home.  You also got a trained technician who could verify that you had a good Internet connection and who could install and test in-home WiFi, ensuring that you have wall-to-wall coverage and that Ignite TV would work well.  That tech would also be able to deal with the majority of installation challenges.

The Forum was also simpler in that ALL Ignite customers had TV, Internet and Home Phone, and the Ignite TV section in the Community was an area where all Ignite TV customers could go with any questions that went beyond the scope of what the Concierge, Sales ands Tech Support could answer.

Self-install is a viable option for anyone who does not require a tech to do any work in the house.  However, if you not comfortable working with technology, require additional in-home wiring work to be done, require assistance installing WiFi properly, or require a pre-sales technical consultation with a Rogers specialist, I think that Rogers needs to be able to provide that level of assistance but I don't know how they plan to address this, especially since we are still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

[OLDYELLR]

@dougjp  Of course you know there is an Ignite TV sub-forum where you can ask any questions.  People there can give you answers to any questions you have before switching. Personally I contacted Rogers when Ignite was first announced and for me it would have been much more expensive and I would have had to adopt Rogers as my ISP, which was unacceptable. But if you have everything with Rogers, it's a viable option if you don't have a better plan like grandfathered VIP.  However, down the road Rogers will eventually discontinue digital and force you to Ignite anyway, but it may be a few years.

[dougjp]

Thanks for your replies, it provides me with more information, but doesn't necessarily solve what I was looking for in the Forum. -G-, your first paragraph says it all. I suppose the TV Board (sub forum) is as appropriate a place as any to post for the combined installation challenges of phone and internet and TV, ie: how and if they interrelate, than the internet or phone sub forum. Where I am, with Compton Cable (a Rogers takeover) I will be forced into Rogers Ignite eventually, a package that doesn't "appear" to work in my relatively common situation (but maybe there's a way?). I'm trying to prepare for it, and losing sleep....

I'll give my situation as an example of why I thought a sub-forum board where people could post details of their existing overall digital setup, would be good to get suggestions of what to do and what is possible.

I'm a senior, don't own a smartphone and have land line phones plugged in at various spots in the house. Not unusual. Current statistics are that 39% of seniors have no cell phone at all, 27% own a basic cell phone which usually sits in a drawer and is taken out only when going somewhere, power turned off as a default, and for emergency use only (I'm in that group), and 34% do own a smartphone (the only ones who could have an app to diagnose an Ignite problem).  Generally, Seniors are good telecom customers to satisfy, especially in non-Covid times, as they use lots of services and have cash, but won't spend it needlessly as the income stream mostly isn't there.  The phone modem is in the basement at one end of the house, plugged into the white junction box for the wall jacks to work.  There is a Rogers modem on the ground floor at the other end of the house, with an ethernet cable going to my router close by, and in turn, to 2 desktop computers and a powerline. Both the current phone and router setup has to keep working somehow, as does a reliable Ignite wireless TV. Its impossible from what I've read so far to do this. And I can't move the electrical panel or the computers and router.

However, if there is only one modem, perhaps a 50-60ft telephone cable wire could run from an Ignite modem on the ground floor to the white phone junction box in the basement for the wall jacks? Alternately, perhaps that length ethernet cable could run from the modem placed in the basement by the electrical panel to my router on the ground floor? Or can there be two Rogers modems instead of one, linked together by a 50-60 ft. ethernet cable and one of them set up as an access point? And another confusion the more I have read, with my router, which way to set up the Rogers modem, gateway or bridge mode?

Can two wifi systems co-exist in the house, the Rogers one and my router's? Tech support for my router says yes, maybe:

" Your modem is working in gateway mode, the Archer A10 working in Router mode.

In this situation, the modem and Archer A10 can work together, and the DHCP function is enabled on Archer A10 and modem, this can coexist, there may be a little impact, which can be ignored (Since there are two wifi at home, the wifi channel may be a bit crowded, you can manually set the two wifi to different channels to solve it).

In this situation, there will be two Wi-Fi in your house, and the devices connecting to the modem Wi-Fi and the devices connecting to the Archer A10 Wi-Fi cannot access each other because they are in different LANs, which means there are two different Wi-Fi in your house. 

Whether Archer A10 is in router mode or access point mode, it must be wired connect to the modem to work. "