said by GuardianU:You might want to have Rogers come out and check your line. I just setup one of those boxes and the quality is perfect. (On an old Tube TV) I had Rogers come in and put down new cable after the tech came and found that there was a problem with the line. You may not have enough signal strength or there could be an incorrect splitter or too many of them that degrade the signal.
I've indeed had signal issues, so Rogers has come by several times, and eventually installed a signal amplifier in the house and replaced some splitters, and then went as far as installing RG11 to my house (replacing the old RG6). However, I have many active outlets in the house. In fact, that's one reason I'm a little hesitant to install Rogers cable internet. Doing that would lower the signal to the rest of the house significantly, potentially impacting TV viewing. The other reason is peak time slowdowns for cable internet downloads.
With that amplifier and RG11 installation my digital signal is now OK for TV. Both HD and SD look fine 8300HD PVRs and 3250HD. Still, that digital adapter has horrid quality in comparison.
BTW, during a reno I replaced a lot of my existing cable (a lot of which was RG59) with brand new RG6. Most of it was the regular builders' RG6 you find at Rona, but for a couple of critical lines I installed higher end Belden cable. To my pleasant surprise, it actually makes a small and consistent signal strength difference even for regular residential distances.
said by Walter Dnes:My current desktop (a 2007 Dell with onboard Intel GPU) can only handle the lowest-speed feed of NHL games. I've got a newer HTPC hooked up to my 50" plasma in my living-room for the highest-speed feed. Not quite HD, but better than SD quality.
Meanwhile, I get 1080p HD Youtube videos just fine, thank you. One of my former co-workers, who lives in the same condo building I do, told me she and her husband quit Rogers because the TV service was out half the time. Bell has FTTN at this building, and had a Fibe-TV promotional event. Teksavvy's website says I qualify for 25 megabit ADSL service at my postal code. But why bother?
Having to constantly have long buffering times with high bitrate YouTube HD would be really irritating. But even more irritating would be the limitation of quality on other content, such as your NHL games, or in my case, Netflix HD.
I don't really need 25 Mbps, but I wouldn't be happy with less than a 15 Mbps account. 15+ Mbps allows you to have Netflix 1080p SuperHD playing and a background large file downloading to your computer, without significantly impacting surfing at the same time. It'd be pushing it though, and 25 Mbps adds extra cushion, while also providing high upload speeds (10 Mbps up in this case) if you want to upload an HD video to Vimeo or something for example.
said by SimplePanda:FYI in my experience NHL Gamecenter isn't great on Rogers cable because of node congestion in my area (High Park, Toronto). It -works-, but constantly flips between HD and SD feeds as the streaming system decides it's too slow for HD and cycles down, then cycles back up when it finds the bandwidth acceptable again.
TekSavvy DSL is basically locked on HD from game start to end.
Indeed. As I've said before, on non-aggregated TPIA, TSI cable sucks in my area. I'm hoping for better for ATPIA, but we shall see. I'll let others be the guinea pigs, but I do know that people on Rogers on this POI also sometimes do have problems.
As I've said before, after a certain threshold, perhaps around 20 Mbps-ish, I value consistency more than top speed. I also like having good uploads, so TSI's 25 VDSL2 plan seems appropriate. This is not to say that VDSL2 is perfect, but judging by posts in this forum, in my area, my experience with VDSL2 has been much better than TSI customers with cable. YMMV.
But seriously, have you considered that there is no compelling reason for gigabit fibre for many Canadians? If not for being a hockey fan, and subscribing to NHL Gamecenter Live, I'd still be OK with the 640Kbit service. As it is, I upgraded a few years ago to 5 (which became 6) megabit ADSL. My current desktop (a 2007 Dell with onboard Intel GPU) can only handle the lowest-speed feed of NHL games. I've got a newer HTPC hooked up to my 50" plasma in my living-room for the highest-speed feed. Not quite HD, but better than SD quality.