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aereolis
join:2003-06-12
Brampton, ON

aereolis to 65194623

Member

to 65194623

Re: Why is Rogers Ultimate Fibre "only" 350Mbps

said by 65194623:

said by cepnot4me:

Realizing that 2% of the customers are using 97% of the bandwidth is part of everything.

Except it isn't and the fallacy isn't true. It's not even possible.
said by cepnot4me:

If Rogers offered 1gbps, only 2% of the customers would use it, and the bandwidth they would use would cost a fortune, so the other 98% of customers would need to foot the bill for that 2. Usage. That's why Rogers will only ever offer a little more than Bell. Only offer what you need to, in order to claim and Market yourself as the "fastest".

It would cost a fortune because they choose to charge a fortune not because it costs them a fortune, it doesn't at all.

The only reason they're offering any options for additional traffic allowances is because of independent ISPs offering competition. Without competition there is no incentive to change anything, but that's painfully obvious.
said by cepnot4me:

There is a lot of excitement around "Fibre" everyone wants a fiber line. However the joke about it all is that most people can't even properly utilize the capability of fiber. I can't tell you how many hundreds of houses I've gone out to on service orders for "slow speeds" and the issue is almost always the restrictions of the customers equipment, their OS on their computer, their LAN card, etc.

Fiber has various short term and long term benefits. Such as being able to offer speeds DOCSIS even with 3.1 cannot match and long term is easier to maintain at the cable plant level and reduces truck rolls for issues.
said by cepnot4me:

Interestingly enough, I think I read an article that showed the current Docsis 3 HFC network is potentially capable of delivering 500 mbps. People want fiber cause it sounds better, cooler. But they don't "need" it. The reason Rogers never went to fiber to the home sooner was it was just an unnecessary liability.

That 500 Mbps is shared over the node, not per user. No they haven't moved to fiber sooner because they didn't want to spend the money, this is pretty straightforward.
said by cepnot4me:

If or when your feed line is cut, coax is repaired for about $75. This is $74 to send a guy, $1 worth of materials to repair it. Worst case, $150 to run a new line to the house.

Now you dig a garden, you cut your fiber line. That's expensive. I don't know how much, but ive heard different costs, $500 being the lowest, $15000+ being the highest. That is why Rogers never wanted fiber straight to the house. Imagine the cost. Ontario ice storm brought down 10,000+ feed lines. Regular construction and yard work cuts 25,000 lines/year. Since one way or another YOU the customer are paying for that, would you prefer to pay $75? Or $500?

$15,000? So much nonsense. Either way the relative exception not the norm is a very weak excuse not to move forward. No, they are not using fiber to the home because it costs a lot of money to replace the cable plant with fibre.
said by cepnot4me:

Fiber is cool, but the more lines run, the more will get damaged by regular seasonal activities, then the higher everyone's bill gets.

Except it doesn't work like that.
said by cepnot4me:

Just because you can order 350mbps, or even 50mbps, doesn't mean your hardware can use it. To even utilize 1gbps you need the latest technology.

Any system relatively modern could take advantage of and benefit from the faster speeds.
said by cepnot4me:

It's like filling your Dodge Neon with Jet fuel, then complaining it's not as fast as an indy car.

Awful analogy that doesn't make sense.
said by cepnot4me:

All of that being said, Bell has made fiber popular. So Rogers need to respond to compete in the market. In my opinion the big reason behind the Fiber Internet plans, is not for Internet speeds or services, cause they can do those speeds on the existing platform. It's because the Fiber internet is the groundwork for the Rogers IPTV product in development. Customers who order the tier, are just unknowingly agreeing to be the guinea pigs for IPTV. You are only testing the backbone for them.

The existing platform can't compete. The existing infrastructure is just fine for their IPTV roll out and most of their IPTV customers will be over DOCSIS.

Some studies need to be done about this 1% 2%. I believe with the advent of netflix those numbers have changed a bit to 3% and 90%.

Rogers doesn't need FTTH for iptv. They just need multicast and lots of bandwidth to each customer on the internet side. Bell is doing just fine with FTTN in toronto providing 25mbit to houses over dsl. Rogers was caught with it's pants down when bell announced the iptv service, and then again with the wireless tv. Rogers' only saving grace thus far has been bell can't keep up with network upgrades necessary to support the customers and many converts switch back to rogers.

Rogers has had the lionshare of internet customers for years and has spent millions on their network upgrades to ensure they have fast speeds even during peak hours. They just need to get their ducks in a row in regards to the switch to iptv and their plans regarding that (they should provide a similar route as bell ensuring data downloaded for iptv doesn't count towards their usage cap) and they will be fine. FTTH has been at the forefront because it introduces new things to the equation such as more reliable service (you can pretty much say good bye to intermittent problems related to the rogers network), faster upload speeds, and bragging rights to TRUE fiber to the house. None of this bell rhetoric sales tactics "we bring fiber to your house" when it's clearly a telephone line.
zamarac
join:2008-11-29
Canada

2 edits

zamarac

Member

said by aereolis:

Rogers has had the lionshare of internet customers for years and has spent millions on their network upgrades to ensure they have fast speeds even during peak hours.

Speed required to fast browse the web is quite low. Higher speeds are needed for HD streaming and torrent downloads, while browsing the web. People fail to realize, advertised speeds can't be considered separately from bandwidth caps. The reason is, at advertised speeds customers usually can download only about 2 days in each month until their bandwidth cap is exhausted. Then they're back to hunger internet diet, only able to lightly browse web sites, and its done at pretty low speeds given slow Rogers DNS servers.

The rest of the month a subscriber pays the money as per his speed plan, but unable to use the network at these speeds due to exorbitant over-usage penalties. That allows his neighbor to use his 2 days swiftly. And soon...so force... So actual bandwidth capacity of a network segment can be kept very low compare to cumulative speeds based capacity Rogers charges their customers for. This looks like false advertising, where subscribers are encouraged to pay for a tier of monthly service that in fact is delivered only 2 days in each month, and then replaced by the service below the lowest advertised tier for the rest of the month.
wayner92
join:2006-01-17
Toronto, ON

wayner92

Member

said by zamarac:

at advertised speeds customers usually can download only about 2 days in each month until their bandwidth cap is exhausted.

Actually it is far less than that. - it is a matter of hours. By my calculation here is how long you can run full out before reaching your cap:

Fiber (350Mbps w 3TB) - 19 hours
Ultimate (250Mbps w 1TB) - 8.9 hours
Ultimate (150Mbps w 250GB) - 3.7 hours
Ext Plus (45 Mbps w 150GB) - 7.4 hours
Extreme (35Mbps w 120GB) - 7.6 hours
Express (25 Mbps w 80GB) - 7.1 hours

Here is my sample calculation - with Ultimate 250 you get 250 Mbps. Divide by 8 (bits/byte) to get 31.25 MBps. Mulitply by 3600 (seconds/hour) to get 112,500 MBperHour. Divide by 1000 to get 112.5 GB/hour. 1000 Gigabytes/112.5(Gigabytes/hour) = 8.9 hours.

In practice the constraint is not as binding as you generally can't use your full speed. The most that I am able to use is about 9.5MBps (or about 75 Mbps) when doing multi-segment downloads. So I could likely saturate Extreme Plus or less, but not any of the Ultimate tiers or Fiber, at least not yet.

Or are my calculations wrong? (I realize that I may be slightly off due to 1GB = 1.07x10^9 bytes, etc)
zamarac
join:2008-11-29
Canada

zamarac

Member

So on 250 mbps plan you get on average 75 mbps file download speed from an HTTP server? Did you ask Rogers why? I wonder what's your max torrent download speed? Mine never goes above 3.6 MBps total regardless of a chosen sub plan and number of torrents in simultaneous download. But some people say, ISPs don't throttle anymore?!
wayner92
join:2006-01-17
Toronto, ON

wayner92

Member

This isn't torrents - I very rarely torrent on my home PC. These speeds are for mulitsegment FTP downloads of files using Bitkenix coming from a server in the Netherlands. I think the limiting factor is peering or interconnects or whatever it is called. Bitkenix divides the file up into 50 segments and downloads those 50 segments at once. For really large files you will have multiple tranches of 50 files downloading.

On single segment FTPs my transfers seem to max out at about 2.2 MBps. Apparently your FTP speeds can be somewhat determined by the latency on the network, something that I don't totally understand.
wayner92

wayner92

Member

Here is an article on maximum WAN speeds and latency. Essentially you need to increase the TCP window size to get faster speeds according to the article: »bradhedlund.com/2008/12/ ··· e-links/

An example they give is that with a 1Gbps line between Chicago and NY with latency of 30ms will give you a maximum transfer speed of 17.4Mbps with the standard TCP windows size of 64kB.
65194623 (banned)
join:2014-01-14

65194623 (banned) to aereolis

Member

to aereolis
said by aereolis:

Some studies need to be done about this 1% 2%. I believe with the advent of netflix those numbers have changed a bit to 3% and 90%.

When I poke and prod people about these arguments it is because they don't use the word bandwidth properly. Frequently they say bandwidth when they really mean traffic. Their argument doesn't even make sense. What equates to no more than 200 odd users on 25Mbps connections cannot use up all of the bandwidth no matter how much they try and same goes even if they were on 250Mbps connections. The issue isn't the amount of traffic transferred it is the capacity AKA bandwidth consumed. It's the 98% that are consuming almost all of the bandwidth AKA capacity.
said by aereolis:

Bell is doing just fine with FTTN in toronto providing 25mbit to houses over dsl.

25Mbps would be fine if it was ONLY IPTV but it is shared with an Internet connection so it is pretty weak in reality. With the use of PVRs having only 3 HD channels is very weak. Contrary to the delusion of a lot of people on here not everyone is a single TV household. So Bell very much has issues competing with Rogers infrastructure and service wise.
said by aereolis:

Rogers has had the lionshare of internet customers for years and has spent millions on their network upgrades to ensure they have fast speeds even during peak hours.

But the way in which Rogers does their upgrade cycles and manages their network results in them having congestion at the nodes way too often. It's great that they're offering the fastest speed tiers but it doesn't mean as much when there is congestion on their network. It would mean a lot more if they were ahead of the game and being proactive instead of reactive with upgrades so congestion did NOT exist.