2.5G Support with Docsis 3.1

[MyAxman]

In order to support the tri band wifi 6E cell phone I have to upgrade my router to take advantage of the 6GHz band. These routers also have 2.5G port coax. The condo I live in offers 5G fiber with Fibestream but the fiber hardware is expensive. I would much rather stay with Rogers and hope they will roll out 2.5. When?

[Datalink]

Rogers uses the Comcast XB6 and XB7 for its Ignite TV IPTV service.  The XB7 has a 2.5 Gb/s port which some users are already using to connect to routers that are equiped with 2.5 Gb/s ports.  That only provides a marginal gain at the moment where a speedtest will top out around 1100 Mb/s instead of the 940 Mb/s that you will see with a 1 Gb/s port on the same modem or other modems.  

Rogers has given no hints as to when, or more importantly, if, they will ever offer service beyond 1 Gb/s down 30 Mb/s up.  Rogers did offer 50 Mb/s up not too long ago and scaled that back to 30 Mb/s up.

Contrast that with Bell, which offers 1.5 Gb/s down 940 Mb/s up or 1 Gb/s down, 750 Mb/s up.  The problem with Bells service is that you may be tied to their modem and as a result you won't see anything more than 940 Mb/s down due to the use of 1 Gb/s ports on the Home Hub 3000 or Home Hub 4000.  By spending more money and time, you can in fact use that full 1.5 Gb/s down with a custom built router.  The problem is the sync rate that is used for the fibre SFP.  

Rogers is rolling out fibre service in some areas.  That service uses a Nokia Optical Network Terminal that has a 10 Gb/s port that can simply be connected to a router that is equipped with a 10 Gb/s port.  That makes higher speeds very simple to attain, but, once again, Rogers has given no hints as to whether or not they will offer higher data rates with that service, beyond the current 1 Gb/s down, 30 Mb/s up.  

Fwiw, for routers that can use 802.11ax in the 5 Ghz band, or routers that can run wifi 6e, there is no guarantee that you will see high data rates on the device itself.  Yes, it will connect at much higher raw data rates, which look good in theory, but, the real determinant in running high data rates is what's behind the wifi or ethernet adapter, and that includes the motherboard design, the processor speed and amount of onboard memory.  You might be surprised to see that spending a lot of time, money , and effort doesn't necessarily pay off with higher user data rates once the wifi or ethernet overhead is subtracted. 

[MyAxman]

Thank you for the update. I probably wont upgrade my current ASUS AX11000 router which supports wifi 6 already. Although my Synology NAS supports 10G the infrastructure cost of switches and related hardware is costly at best. Fibestream offers 5Gbps and is only marginally more expensive than Rogers 1G service. My experience with Bell has been disappointing at best and I wouldn't pursue solutions with that carrier.