Fiber Availability

[Tmothy12]

Does Rogers plan to bring fibre to everywhere in Canada? How about the GTA? If so, how long will rollout take?

I would like to be able to have higher upload speeds than 50Mbps.

[LordDrakkon]

I wish!  I live in one of the densest areas in Scarborough and we still don't have fibre here.  I can get 1.5 Gigabit down but the 50 Mbit up is a complete and useless joke!  Anything less than 500 Mbit up for me, is pointles but Bell only offers 25 Mbit / 5 Mbit up DSL here.  It's pretty sad when 5G on my s23 Ultra has a superior upload than my over priced Rogers Ignite Internet.  

[-G-]

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@Tmothy12 wrote:
Does Rogers plan to bring fibre to everywhere in Canada? How about the GTA? If so, how long will rollout take?

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I think I can confidently say that the answer is, yes, eventually... but there is no telling when.

A few years ago, rumour had it that moving existing neighbourhoods (with old analog fibre nodes) from coax to FTTH was a high priority for Rogers.  However, it seems that the strategy now is to keep neighbourhoods with coax on coax for as long as possible.  Rogers is currently upgrading old neighbourhood nodes to new DAA / R-PHY technology and moving to a virtual CCAP architecture.   The next step will be to implement mid-split, sunset legacy technologies to free up spectrum, allocate more spectrum to DOCSIS 3.1, and eventually move to DOCSIS 4.0.

I would like to be able to have higher upload speeds than 50Mbps.

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With D3.1 and mid-split, Rogers will probably start offering 150 Mbps upstream.  Presumably Rogers will follow Comcast's lead and eventually roll out full-duplex DOCSIS 4.0 and with that, a multi-gigabit symmetric service.

That's all great... and will allow Rogers to compete with FTTH to some degree... but eventually Bell will tire of not being able to compete with DSL, or companies like CIK or telMAX will bring fibre into neighbourhoods on their own and offer a fast, reliable Internet service at much lower prices than the incumbents.  When either of those happen, Rogers will not be able to compete with a DOCSIS Internet offering.

If an upgrade to FTTH is inevitable, then why wait and why waste a TON of money on DOCSIS infrastructure upgrades that cannot compete, that have no long-term future?  Part of the problem is that Comcast is committed to DOCSIS 4.0, is building products to support DOCSIS 4.0, and those are the products that Rogers uses as the basis for their Ignite offerings.  The bulk of Rogers' customers also don't even have 500 Mbps Internet so, to them, D4.0 still offers a sizeable upgrade path.  Until a disruptive force changes the game, neighbourhoods with coax will remain on coax for as long as Rogers can continue to sell their DOCSIS Internet service. 

[LordDrakkon]

150 Mbps up is still a joke considering the usage that homes use today.  We live in a heavily connected world and yet the ability to send that information is still crippled.  I am not loyal to any company.  If Bell ever gets fibre here (not just the service they deceptively name fibre that isn't fibre), I will switch in a heartbeat for 2 Gbps up and down.  I get that I and some others might not be the average customer but it isn't the average customer that drives innovation.  As the only person that lives at my address with 21+ devices connected via WiFi at any given time and at least two PC's and a handful of gaming consoles.  Rogers makes the online multiplayer experience incredibly disappointing.  Especially when multitasking on the connection.  We're paying more to get stuck with basically what's good for the average streaming household that represents my grandparents demographic.  

[Tmothy12]

I didn't know about all of that. You'd think it would be cheaper to just install fibre rather than upgrade cable infrastructure and then implement fibre anyway. Especially if (as you brought up) competition emerges..

[JC008]

In my area there's already fiber laid by the govt. BELL is running true fiber.

Roger's door to door sales came to offer 1.5Gbps internet. I thought that's great! And first 3 months is free too... Until they showed up with Coax boxes! And the fine print is.. Upload speed is 10mbps! What are we doing? Why even advertise it as fiber? Even starlink has faster upload!

[Biollw]

Rogers upload speed on 1.5g plan is actually 50m not 10m.