Rogers announced on Tuesday it has successfully tested lab and customer trials of 8 Gbps fibre broadband internet, and it’s set to launch in the summer of 2022.
The company said the test saw symmetrical download and upload speeds of up to 8 Gbps on its fibre network, which is over double the current fastest internet speeds offered by major providers in Canada.
Earlier this month, Bell announced 3 Gbps download speeds for its fibre internet service.
Rogers says its plan is to reach 10 Gbps symmetrical download and upload speeds for Ignite Internet. That should be more than enough speed for your Facebook browsing activity.
“Fibre-powered networks are the foundation of building world-class connectivity solutions for our customers, and it is critical that the network technology delivers on the reliability and speed our customers need,” said Robert Dépatie, President and Chief Operating Officer, Home and Business, Rogers Communications, in an issued statement. “With download and upload speeds of up to 8 Gigabits per second and an advanced fibre technology, customers will be able to explore streaming TV, online game play, videoconferencing, immersive virtual reality and more, like never before.”
Rogers Ignite Internet will launch an 8 Gbps plan starting this summer, available in select areas in Ontario, New Brunswick and Newfoundland.
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Rogers announces something that nobody wanted, asked for or needs.
In a country that’s average Download and Upload speed is ~100mbps (or less), and most hardware maxes out at 1gbps…
I got the 3 gig plan to try it for a month on Bell (with a bill credit for the difference for the month)- and almost nothing fully saturated it (speedtest, steam and torrents seem to) but that’s about it.
Rogers announcing this is basically an appendage measuring contest.
Exactly this, and I’m also left wondering how widely it will be available. Bell runs dedicated fibre lines into homes to support its service. Doing these speeds over DOCSIS technology is considerably more complicated.
I got the 3Gbps with Bell, too, mostly because I could. I do enough video work that the faster upload speeds are nice, but I was doing fine on the 1.5Gbps plan — and even that was a waste in terms of download speeds, as the HomeHub 3000 that I had only offered Gigabit Ethernet ports. At least the HH4000 has a single 10Gbps port.
At 3Gbps, I’m already running faster than most of the sites I’ll ever connect to, considering those are usually saturated with thousands of users sharing their bandwidth.
If anything, these higher-speed plans are designed for busy households where multiple people use a lot of bandwidth at once, but even those needs are overestimated. The highest-bitrate streaming video services cap out at around 50Mbps, and most average 25Mbps — even for a 4K HDR stream. Even when 8K video streams become a thing someday, those might hit a 150Mbps average based on current containers and encoding methods. However, there’s also work on newer methods to get those down into the 80Mbps range.
Further, most customers don’t even have equipment that can truly handle anything over 1Gbps (and even that’s pushing it). I never thought we’d reach the day when consumer broadband speeds outpace consumer hardware. Wi-Fi 6 may offer theoretical speeds of up to 4.8Mpbs on a single 5GHz channel, but no consumer client devices can take advantage of those kinds of speeds. A few expensive adapters will break the 1Gbps barrier when you’re sitting five feet away from the router under near-perfect conditions, but most come in at a more modest 600Mbps.
Exactly! I upload about 20-30 gigs a day for work (also in video production) – plus I started YouTube back in November and was spoiled and uploading full ProRes files LOL (my handle is the YouTube channel if you’re interested) – I gotta film part 2 of my 3 gig review which basically covers this. Thank God I waited to film it because this 8 gig announcement from Rogers is … SPICY LOL
That being said, YouTube upload touches gigabit upload speeds in spikes, but never beyond that, Dropbox is about the same, and my work server can’t go above gigabit in terms of receiving, so the extra money isn’t worth it. I think one day in my profession(s) (I’m also a radio mixshow DJ with a syndication for a bigger media company here in Canada)- I may find utility in 3, 5 or even 10 gig, but the internet as a whole isn’t ready for everybody to have 1 gig, let alone 3 gig.
The best Wi-Fi performance I see with my ASUS AX89X connected to the HomeHub 4000 via an iPhone 13 Pro Max is around 780 mbit which is impressive for a phone – and wildly unnecessary LOL. That being said, it’s nice, but 1.5 feels exactly the same except for the use-cases I originally mentioned.
Also, re: DOCSIS, the speeds are hard to do as coax supporting these higher speeds is a mess, and not to mention, you still won’t get fibre levels of latency. I’m kind of on a crusade about gamers thinking that upload/download will make a difference for in-game performance. I think the only benefit to these higher tiers are for downloading games and updates – but even then, consoles don’t do beyond gigabit. And gaming PCs w/ 2.5 GbE or higher or going to need the equipment / services to support it. What a weird time we’re in. Now to see competition create a better pricing rollout, one can only hope anyway. I think 500/500 for gamers on a fibre connection is the sweet spot and a bit overkill even.
It’s funny you should mention gamers, as I actually forgot to add that to my earlier comment when I was talking about streaming speeds. Gaming doesn’t even need those speeds. Latency is key in gaming, and as you said, Rogers isn’t going to deliver that over coax.
I reviewed dozens of routers for a big tech site in one of my last gigs, and I actually almost went with the RT-AX89X for its SFP and 10Gbps ports, but I wanted to build a wireless mesh, and you can’t properly do that with a dual-band router — at least not if you want top speeds throughout. Instead, I deployed the GT-AX11000 and a pair of ZenWifi XT8’s, which got me up into a similar 500–750Mbps range from my iPhone 12 Pro Max, and quite impressively let me maintain those kinds of speeds everywhere in my home. Even out in the middle of my back yard I was still getting around 400Mbps.
Sadly, like with many Asus routers, it came with other reliability problems. Asus’ firmware can be dodgy at the best of times when it comes to things like multicast DNS, Bonjour, and even some older 2.4GHz Wi-Fi devices. My HomeKit devices would mysteriously drop off at random times, AirPrint didn’t work reliably, and my Apple TV would start lagging at the most unusual times — even though it was sitting only a few feet away from one of the XT8 mesh points. As a result, I switched over to an Eero 6 Pro system, and while it doesn’t offer the same top performance, it’s still more than enough for my needs; I hardware my MacBook Pro anyway (directly into the HH4000 now), and I can’t imagine anybody that really needs more than 250Mbps on an iPhone. More importantly, it’s been completely bulletproof when it comes to my IoT gear.
The runner-up for me would have been the Linksys Velop Wi-Fi 6 system (the new AX4200 version), but I’d already given that one away to a friend after I finished my review; Eero also beat Linksys by a few months in adding HomeKit support to its Wi-Fi 6 mesh system.
So I’m actually in talks with ASUS now. Long story short, NAT acceleration is absolutely necessary to get 3 gig to work – but the issue is, my 1 GbE clients would see a speed dip down to between 700 and 500 mbit (Wi-Fi wasn’t affected) – so we Telnetted into the router and changed the 10GbE port from PPE to NSS and it resolved it. Unfortunately the change won’t be in the next firmware (if the router reboots, it resets the change)- so I’m getting a custom firmware to use until they roll the change officially.
Do you do product reviews? I saw the notifications on YouTube about your comments but haven’t had a moment to reply as of yet. I literally just started having over a decade or final cut experience but yet- never using a camera ever until August last year (using a Panasonic GH5 Mark II) – hoping to turn YouTube into something meaningful but am loving the process so far, minus how expensive it’s become in the quest for a great workflow / quality balance.
Interesting. I never did extensive testing on the 10Gbps ports on the AX89X, but I had heard similar reports of compatibility problems. I could also never get the SFP+ port working with Fibe 1.5Gbps — I had originally hoped to bypass the HH3000 entirely using it, but gave up and went with a cheaper Netgear managed switch instead (the GC110). That only gave me 1Gbps, but that was fine as I had only gone with the 1.5Gbps plan for the faster upload speeds.
However, I ended up putting the HH3000 back in when I went back to the Eero Pro system, as it didn’t support PPPoE at the time (they only added this in the past couple of months). So the HH3000 front-ended the connection and I just lived with double-NAT (which isn’t as scary as it was years ago — most applications know how to deal with NAT properly now).
I’m not actively doing router reviews right now; I handled roundups and reviews of networking gear for Lifewire for a couple of years but left last fall as a result of a big reorganization. In fact, my last two reviews for the Eero Pro 6 and Linksys Velop AX4200 got lost in that shuffle and were never actually published. Most of my roundups are still live over there, however.
Very very cool!
On the Linksys Velop and the Eero Pro we’re you using the native firmware or the HomeKit secure setup?
To be clear, it’s the same firmware — the HomeKit features are just something that you switch on in the router’s app.
I never had the opportunity to test the Velop with the HomeKit Secure Router firmware, as Linksys hadn’t released it for its Wi-Fi 6 (AX4200) model when I was testing it. However, I used the feature on both the original Wi-Fi 5 Eero Pro and am now using it on the Eero Pro 6. Neither router has any particularly useful firewall rules on its own, so enabling the HomeKit features is really the only way to secure IoT devices (as long as they’re using HomeKit).
As an added bonus, Wi-Fi HomeKit devices also get assigned a unique authentication key, so they don’t need to use the actual Wi-Fi password to connect. This makes the password less vulnerable to exposure if there’s a bug in the firmware, but it also means that you can change your main network Wi-Fi password without having to run around your house and manually update a few dozen smart home devices.
Thanks a lot for your reply. So you found that both the Eero Pro 5, Eero Pro 6, and Linksys Velop systems were all really reliable with things like bonjour, AirPrint and your IoT devices not losing connection? But not so much withe ASUS router?
I switched a few years ago to a netgear R7000P to replace my aging Airport router. I did lots of research and it came very highly reviewed at the time by the Wirecutter. I am pretty happy with it. It definitely improved reception against the congested competing networks in my crowded apartment building, and throughput I get 600-700 mbps, even though it is “only” WiFi 5. However there are lots of little idiosyncrasies that are quite annoying. The worst of which is that when I connect to one of my computers on my local network via VNC, whereas previously it was near instantaneous, it now takes quite a long time to resolve, about 45-60 seconds. I know, not the end of the world. But as I do that 5-10 times per day, it’s quite annoying actually. Especially as even that old hardware could do it so much faster. Those sorts of things seem to be so hard to research with a router, save just buying a ton and doing trial and error.
Also, I didn’t even bother to spring for the fastest possible Thunderbolt adapter, for all the reasons we’ve already discussed. My TB3 hub only has a Gigabit port, but when I shopped around, a portable Thunderbolt adapter with a 2.5Gbps port could be had for under $40 on Amazon, while 5Gbps versions were at least twice as much, and 10Gbps ones were ridiculous.
Good review, BTW 👍🏻
It’s not complicated to run it on Docsis at all, ofdm modulation for most of 54 to 1.2ghz will replace Qam 256 then full Duplex on Downstream and Upstream qams…. nothing new really.
Sure, the technology is there so it’s not complicated on that level. It’s entirely doable, but logistically it’s much more complicated to deploy consistently and reliably. There’s a lot more infrastructure required to get those speeds over the last mile. That’s probably why we’re seeing a much slower rollout.
No, no more conversion from light to RF back to light in the headends equals less equipment, the rest is simple modulation, 32 Downstream qams to 6 ofdm qams. The next step is to put the CMTS in the cloud.. very the technology is actually making it easier to deploy!
I’m fine with my 500Mbps, but get me past the 20Mbps upload speed! It’s embarrassing.
okay cool, now lower the 1gb plan jesus