So I spent half my day driving around testing Rogers LTE Network. I traveled all over the Greater Toronto Area and I discovered something interesting. When I connected to the Rogers network from the Dundas St. and Highway 403 which is the border between the Toronto suburbs of Mississauga and Oakville, I got this result from the Rogers Connection Manager:
Hmmmm…. No LTE. So when I did my Speedtest.net test, I wasn’t shocked by what I got as a result:
While it’s still faster than my DSL connection, it’s not LTE. I got similar results in the Toronto suburbs of Markham, Pickering, and Vaughn. I checked the Rogers LTE coverage map and discovered that the LTE coverage in Toronto largely means the City of Toronto. Don’t expect to get LTE speeds very far outside the the 416/647 area code. The same is likely true in Ottawa, Montreal, and Vancouver. This will of course change as Rogers extends the LTE network to cover more of the population.
The good news is that in areas with LTE coverage, I got similar results to yesterday in terms of speed, that is 20+ Mbps, which is what Rogers says you should get. Hopefully as time goes on users will also see speeds approaching the maximum speeds that Rogers has been advertising which is 75 Mbps.
Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the plans that are available for LTE users which I think will be the deciding factor as to how popular this technology will be.