Time For Takeoff

[AccordXTC]

Hello

Anyone getting a notice on there door about Rogers being committed to connecting Canadians with the latest technology? Our service has been down since early this morning and still down. I wasn't aware of anything new coming out besides Ignite TV and don't have nor want the service. 

What's this all about? 

***Added Labels***

[toolcubed]

I received a letter on my door last March about a new “vault” being installed beside my house. The letter wasn’t directly from Rogers, but rather from a 3rd party sub-contracted by Rogers. It said it was part of Rogers’ commitment to install more fibre. It also said there was no ETA on when it would be installed. I’ve been trying to find out from Rogers but I haven’t been successful.

[Gdkitty]

Could be any number of things possibly..

Could be upgrading stuff like the local nodes.. upgrading the hardware there, allow better internet, faster connections, etc.

I remember getting an email recently with similar.. which I think was primarily focusing on the cellular structure? 
(more towers, getting ready for 5g, etc)

[AccordXTC]

Services were back up around 4pm yesterday but not sure on the improvements yet. The speeds are slower then before after restarting the modem. Maybe the work is not completed yet in the area to know yet or see. 

The only thing I would have liked to know is time to complete the work or ETA this way I know if I have a current issue or not.

[toolcubed]

"Prepare for liftoff" network enhancement notification left on my door

Hi everyone, a flyer was left on my door yesterday (see screenshot attached).  In fact, this was left on every door in my neighbourhood.  I called the number on the flyer and spoke to someone at Rogers who said it was a "fibre to the curb" upgrade.  He couldn't explain or provide any additional details.  I've never heard of fibre to the "curb"...I've heard of fibre to the node and fibre to the home, but not to the "curb".  Does anyone know what this means?  Is Rogers pushing fibre right to my local tap, and then it would just be coax from the tap straight into my home??

[RyzenFX]

@toolcubed

Interesting. Does your neighborhood have a history of having a high utilization on the upload/ or is always bandwidth starved?

[Datalink]

National Broadband Network Australia is going the "fibre to the curb" route in its upgrade to fibre optics.  This involves running fibre to a pit just in front of the home, near or at the curb.  The home is then connected to the fibre via traditional copper cabling.  

Maybe Rogers is going this route instead, which is to push the copper core out of its aluminum shield and blow in fibre optic cable to replace it.  You end up with fibre optics from the neighbourhood  node to the local tap (pedestal) with copper cabling to the home:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQJUSGLCi0M

Its either that, or you're going to see lawns and driveways ripped up to install newer copper cabling or fibre optics.  Keep us posted on which method is used.  

[toolcubed]

Will do. Construction has already started a couple of streets over. And several weeks back, a few guys came around to mark up the sidewalks and grass with spray paint and mini flags where water and gas is located...they did this all over my half of the neighbourhood. Presumably to prep for the work Rogers is going to be doing, which appears to be quite a bit of digging. This is all very exciting stuff 🙂 I’ll keep you guys posted, possibly with pics of progress if I have the time.

Edit: Datalink, thanks for that video. Very cool 🙂

[toolcubed]

UPDATE

Construction has started on my street. Spoke to one of the guys from NX Utilities, which is the company doing the work. They’re boring and laying new conduit from the fibre node to the nearby taps/pedestals closer to our homes. Then they’re going to feed fibre thru those conduits and Rogers will do the splicing and finalize the hookup in early Dec. Confirmed it’s fibre to the curb. FINALLY! I’ve been waiting for these improvements for a VERY long time 🙂

[57]

Rogers has had FTTN in most places for a long time and RF-coax to the home has been enough to provide good bandwidth for the several hundred people typically connected to a node (offering as high as 1GB downloads) .

Now that many more people are demanding more bandwidth (even though most of them don't need it) I'm guessing that the RF-coax (from the node) is now not enough to meet the demands where many people demand high bandwidth.  So, you need FTTC (curb) to meet those demands with fewer people connected to the Curb box (pedestal).  I'm guessing that RF-coax to the home (from the curb) will be adequate for the near future, eventually giving way to Fibre also.  Of course IPTV (IgniteTV) also plays into this.

Bell's legacy twisted pair cables could not provide the bandwidth (25-100 mpbs max depending), so they had to go FTTH to be competitive.

[BS]

It will be interesting to see the impacts of these changes - there are signs up in our area that they will be doing the work soon and have been working throughout the town and this helps me understand what they have been up to.

This may account for why suddenly I had Bell reps at my door again this week, talking about how they have fiber cable to the pedestal.  I took him on a short walk down the street to the Bell Fibe node (the big white boxes) and explained where the node for Rogers was sitting, just down the street from there, and the combination of new and old pedestals along the street.  I also showed him where there are new pedestals and old pedestals for Bell along the street, and that new pedestals had been installed on new acquisitions and that a tech had told me that it was still copper to the new pedestal, it just prepares them to connect fiber once it is laid from the node to the curb as is mentioned here, and then also allows in their system to go directly to the home from the pedestal.

I pointed out to him by showing him two loose pedestals from both companies, that it is coax on the Rogers pedestal, and copper punch downs on the old Bell ones.

He then back paddled and said oh they were preparing to put that all in place, but that I can currently get 100Mbs down and asynchronous up with the new pedestal and be fully prepared for when full GB comes.

I opened up my phone off my wifi and showed him that online, a quick search on my postal code showed 100Mbs and 10Mbs with a warning that it can range from 1.8 minimum to 10 maximum.

He suggested that it didn't reflect that they are able to change it over, that it is ready for that now.

I left him at that, with the comment, that upload speed isn't relevant, and my caps and speed are fine for our needs and what mattered at this point at this house is the price.

As a side note, he first suggested he could get lower than my current package, which he did, but by coincidence, he forgot to put in my HBO/Movies/Crave and that two months free doesn't help get lower, nor did he include three of the key channels we watch that are added to our Rogers service.  Bye bye.  It was a distraction for me, I am house bound, so it is entertaining to listen, to debunk things I am told (I know just too much for them).  But then again, when I was calling Rogers today about the usage page on MyRogers, they tried to market a data package on our phones (just a small increase - 15 + 2.20 with loss of BCB for me or 5.00 + 4.40 lost BCB for my wife - makes so, somewhere around 240 with tax per year for my wife and over 300.00 for my wife). I have heard this same pitch 3 times in the last 6 months when phoning in on issues not related.  Everyone is trying to get me to spend more while my goal is to spend less with less service of course.

But it is great to see that the companies are being creative at dealing with the last mile to the home.  My only hope is that it doesn't result in too much of those notices of we have to increase prices to improve services.  It will just mean that I cut my services - just my reality of life, but great for those who are able to afford these improvements, which definitely will have to come with more IP tv and more bandwidth usage, whether we really need it or not.

Thanks for keeping us up to date on what has been learned about these improvements - certainly, both companies are still racing to the finish line on how to get the fastest, most reliable services out to as many people as possible.

Bruce

[toolcubed]

UPDATE:

Construction is done. It was pretty crazy. They needed access to my property. Rolled in a mini boring machine and tore up my lawn! Thankfully everything is back to normal.

Today, a Bell truck rolled in to string the fibre cable thru the newly installed conduits. Yes, you read that right....a BELL truck lol. I went out to talk to the guys and they confirmed that they (Bell) are installing the physical fibre cable for Rogers. I find 2 things funny with that - 1. Rogers has contracted Bell (their largest competitor) to lay the fibre; and 2. Bell doesn’t even have any of their own fibre infrastructure around here as I can only get 50Mbps VDSL service from them. Looking forward to Rogers coming in and completing the splicing/hookup soon!

[RyzenFX]

@toolcubed

Great to hear that progress is being made. Do you know if they will use the existing Rogers pedestal located in front of your property to terminate the fibre, or will they dig a separate terminatation box underground (like Bell usually does in their FTTH setups)?

[BS]

Interesting question - I will have to ask the next time a tech is on the street - I do know that in our area, every pedestal that has been replaced in the last few years is not the tiny round ones, but now the large highly ventilated rectangular box ones, so my guess would be that they will be replacing pedestals like Bell.

I know that in my neigbourhood that Bell has been replacing pedestals for new connections, although still FTTN, not home, and it has allowed them to increase the speed to those homes on the standard copper feed to 150 down when people have received both got their Fibe TV installs.  In each location where there were more than one house connected to Fibe TV, we saw their speed moved to 150 down, still 10 up, due to the increased bandwidth that came from these new pedestals (don't iknow technologically what is achieving the result), but those who just have Internet, phone and sattelite, (lots of them in our area still - we are about 30% Rogers, 30% Sattelite with Bell Internet, and other mixes, and about 20 % are now on digital antennas).  The world in my neighbourhood of Internet, TV and phone is certainly a changing.  As I have walked the neighbourhood and talked to people about their services, we are a bit of a generally lower middle class area, all used to be middle class, most are staying on lower speeds, digital cable.  There is not an Ignite install in our neighbourhood that I am aware of, in fact, I haven't seen a Rogers truck down our roads in quite a while, although they are certainly moving across the north end of Whitby quickly with the upgrades being described here.  But I know from my neighbours, for most of us, price is the driving factor, but doesn't take away from my interest of what they are doing.

 Bruce

[RyzenFX]

@toolcubed

If you can, take a picture of your DOCSIS WAN stats before and after the upgrade. I wonder how the signal strength, SNR, will change with this upgrade. 

[toolcubed]

They did A LOT of digging up and down my street and several other streets in the neighbourhood.  I included some pics below (sorry, not sure why they're sideways).  I also posted my current modem stats at the bottom of this post.  I'll post the new stats once the hookup is all done in a few weeks.  In summary, they did the following:

1. They replaced an underground fibre termination/junction box with a very large 4ft high by 3ft wide fibre vault located down my street (sorry, no pic of this one but it's the same as the second pic below).  My neighbourhood now has 4 of these large vaults!!!

2. They replaced a light green ventilated pedestal located at the corner of my house with an underground fibre termination/junction box (see first pic below).

3. They installed a brand new 4ft high by 3ft wide fibre vault across my side street (see second pic below).  Again, this is just 1 of 4 in total in my neighbourhood.  Prior to the node split they did back in Sep/Oct, we only had 1 of these vaults.

4. They ran fibre between each of the boxes mentioned above as well as running fibre to the green pedestal where the coax running to my house is located (they did not replace this pedestal and I did not include a pic of it).

This is the underground fibre junction box I mentioned in #2 above:

This is the fibre vault I mentioned in #3 above...4 of these bad boys in my neighbourhood:

Here's the behemoth they rolled onto my property to dig!:

My modem stats now (fibre splicing/hookup is NOT done yet):

Downstream Overview

Port ID	Frequency (MHz)	Modulation	Signal strength (dBmV)	Channel ID	Signal noise ratio (dB)
1	591000000	256QAM	0.900	7	37.636
2	855000000	256QAM	1.800	3	38.605
3	861000000	256QAM	1.700	4	38.605
4	579000000	256QAM	0.800	5	37.356
5	585000000	256QAM	0.800	6	37.636
6	849000000	256QAM	2.000	2	38.605
7	597000000	256QAM	1.000	8	37.636
8	603000000	256QAM	1.000	9	37.636
9	609000000	256QAM	1.100	10	37.636
10	615000000	256QAM	1.100	11	37.636
11	621000000	256QAM	1.000	12	37.636
12	633000000	256QAM	1.200	13	37.356
13	639000000	256QAM	1.300	14	38.605
14	645000000	256QAM	1.800	15	37.636
15	651000000	256QAM	1.900	16	38.605
16	657000000	256QAM	1.800	17	37.636
17	663000000	256QAM	1.800	18	38.605
18	669000000	256QAM	1.600	19	37.356
19	675000000	256QAM	1.900	20	37.636
20	681000000	256QAM	1.900	21	38.605
21	687000000	256QAM	1.900	22	37.636
22	693000000	256QAM	1.800	23	37.636
23	699000000	256QAM	2.000	24	37.636
24	705000000	256QAM	1.900	25	38.605
25	711000000	256QAM	1.300	26	37.636
26	717000000	256QAM	1.200	27	37.636
27	723000000	256QAM	1.200	28	37.636
28	825000000	256QAM	1.700	29	37.636
29	831000000	256QAM	1.600	30	37.356
30	837000000	256QAM	1.600	31	38.605
31	843000000	256QAM	1.600	32	37.636
32	303000000	256QAM	-0.300	1	38.605

OFDM Downstream Overview

Receiver	FFT type	Subcarr 0 Frequency(MHz)	PLC locked	NCP locked	MDC1 locked	PLC power(dBmv)
0	4K	275600000	YES	YES	YES	0.700001
1	NA	NA	NO	NO	NO	NA

Upstream Overview

Port ID	Frequency (MHz)	Modulation	Signal strength (dBmV)	Channel ID	Bandwidth
1	30596000	ATDMA - 64QAM	37.750	1	6400000
2	38596000	ATDMA - 64QAM	41.000	3	3200000
3	23700000	ATDMA - 64QAM	37.750	2	6400000

[RyzenFX]

Pretty cool stuff going on in your neighborhood. 

From what you've described so far, it's possible that they decided to segment your neighborhood by providing 3 additional nodes, making for a total of 4 nodes. These 4 nodes will definitely alleviate the congestion you're experiencing.

For the underground fibre junction box as (picture #1), those are usually where the amplifiers are housed, so they could be removed as it is no longer needed due to the FTTC approach. Sounds like they could be aiming for a Node+0 approach in your neighborhood.

[toolcubed]

@RyzenFX

NX Utilities and Rogers crews were out in full force yesterday and today working on a good deal of the hookup between nodes and pedestals.  My cable services were down for over 2 hours today.  I went out to speak to the techs and they confirmed a few things for me.  First, they confirmed that this is NOT FTTC.  It's simply network segmentation.  While it's fibre to the node (we now have 4 nodes in the neighbourhood), it's still coax from the nodes to the pedestals, but it's new/upgraded coax.  The Rogers tech also told me that there's another planned maintenance session scheduled for next Tues, Dec 11th, which is when they're going to "cutover"...not sure what that means exactly because they've already done quite a bit of work yesterday and today.  When they left, I rebooted my modem and tv boxes, and took a look at signal levels.  The CODA took quite a bit longer to reboot, and when I logged into it, I noticed signal across all 32 DOCSIS 3.0 channels were all above +10db.  The OFDM channel was at +8db.  The NB3 TV boxes were at +3.5db on most channels.  So I decided to get rid of the 2-way splitter and amplifier completely, and I hooked everything up to a single 4-way Antronix splitter (-7db on all 4 ports).  Just to be clear, all 4 of my devices (modem, home phone, and 2 NB3 boxes) are on a single 4-way splitter where the main line coming into the house is also connected to...that's it.  That brought the NB3 signal to around 0db on most channels.  Here are my CODA levels (again, this is on a 4-way splitter...still a tad high in my opinion):

Downstream Overview

Port ID	Frequency (MHz)	Modulation	Signal strength (dBmV)	Channel ID	Signal noise ratio (dB)
1	591000000	256QAM	5.300	7	37.636
2	849000000	256QAM	6.100	2	37.356
3	855000000	256QAM	5.500	3	37.636
4	861000000	256QAM	5.200	4	37.636
5	579000000	256QAM	5.200	5	37.356
6	585000000	256QAM	5.400	6	37.636
7	303000000	256QAM	2.900	1	38.983
8	597000000	256QAM	5.000	8	37.636
9	603000000	256QAM	5.300	9	37.636
10	609000000	256QAM	5.400	10	37.356
11	615000000	256QAM	5.100	11	37.356
12	621000000	256QAM	4.900	12	37.356
13	633000000	256QAM	5.500	13	37.636
14	639000000	256QAM	5.400	14	37.636
15	645000000	256QAM	6.300	15	37.356
16	651000000	256QAM	6.700	16	37.636
17	657000000	256QAM	6.400	17	37.636
18	663000000	256QAM	6.100	18	37.636
19	669000000	256QAM	6.100	19	37.356
20	675000000	256QAM	6.400	20	37.636
21	681000000	256QAM	6.300	21	37.636
22	687000000	256QAM	6.500	22	37.636
23	693000000	256QAM	6.700	23	37.356
24	699000000	256QAM	6.700	24	37.356
25	705000000	256QAM	6.200	25	37.636
26	711000000	256QAM	5.900	26	37.356
27	717000000	256QAM	6.000	27	37.356
28	723000000	256QAM	5.800	28	37.356
29	825000000	256QAM	5.900	29	37.636
30	831000000	256QAM	5.800	30	37.356
31	837000000	256QAM	5.400	31	37.636
32	843000000	256QAM	5.300	32	37.636

OFDM Downstream Overview

Receiver	FFT type	Subcarr 0 Frequency(MHz)	PLC locked	NCP locked	MDC1 locked	PLC power(dBmv)
0	NA	NA	NO	NO	NO	NA
1	4K	275600000	YES	YES	YES	3.900002

Upstream Overview

Port ID	Frequency (MHz)	Modulation	Signal strength (dBmV)	Channel ID	Bandwidth
1	30596000	ATDMA - 64QAM	40.500	1	6400000
2	38595785	ATDMA - 64QAM	43.250	3	3200000
3	23700000	ATDMA - 64QAM	39.250	2	6400000

[Datalink]

Yup, those DOCSIS 3.1 signal levels are high, but, their ok where they are.  The upstream are higher due to the splitter, so, thats understandable.  The DOCSIS 3.1 levels are probably higher than normal but you would have to call tech support to determine what those numbers are. 

If the techs are around I'd ask about the high signal levels.  I wonder if they're going to dial that down since those nodes aren't driving all of the modems in the neighbourhood now.  

If you run a wired speedtest using the www.speedtest.net Toronto Vmedia server, what do you get for results?

[toolcubed]

540-560 down and 21 up over wifi on my 500/20 plan. Wired will likely be similar or slightly higher on download speed.

Another thing...now I don’t have a MOCA filter because I’m only using the splitter. Can I grab one somewhere (like a Rogers store) or do I have to get a tech to visit for that? I REALLY want to avoid a tech visit.

[Datalink]

I'd call the nearest Rogers store and ask.  I doubt they would have any, but, hey, you never know.   Failing that, if you happen to see a tech in the neighbourhood, I'd ask the tech for one.  

Are you using a MoCO 2.0 qualified splitter?  

http://www.hollandelectronics.com/catalog/catalog.php?product_id=catv-moca-splitter

Here's the spec sheet for the MoCA filters.  Assuming that the splitter is indoors, a MOCA-IHF would do:

http://www.hollandelectronics.com/pdf/MoCA-Series-Filters-1.6.pdf