The IT Nerd

Hot off the heels of Rogers rising from the dead after being beaten down by Bell for years because Bell has a much faster Internet offering, comes this announcement. To follow up with their announcement of 8 Gbps fibre that is coming this summer, comes the announcement of 2.5 Gbps service:

Rogers announced today that it has launched new fibre-powered Ignite Internet packages and bundles, with symmetrical download and upload speeds of up to 2.5 Gigabits per second (Gbps). Existing Rogers customers that subscribe to Ignite Internet Gigabit 1.5 will be automatically upgraded to symmetrical speeds up to 2.5 Gbps starting today at no extra cost. Building on its commitment to provide leading next-generation products and services to its customers, Rogers is offering even faster download and upload speeds in a growing number of homes and neighbourhoods across Ontario, New Brunswick and Newfoundland.

That’s great if you have their 1.5 Gbps service. Because prior to writing this story I pinged a bunch of my clients all over what is known as the Golden Horseshoe which is basically Toronto, east of Toronto, Hamilton, and Niagara Region and nobody has their 1.5 Gbps service. Most of them are stuck on Rogers uncompetitive and rather embarrassing 1 Gbps downstream/30 Mbps upstream service or tiers that are slower than that. Which means that this new service isn’t going to benefit the majority of Rogers customers anytime soon. Contrast that with Bell who served this up on Twitter this morning:

Bell continues to be hyper aggressive in terms of getting their fibre network to more places as fast as they can as evidenced by the Tweet above. As a result Bell’s fibre footprint is massive compared to what little fibre Rogers has. Which means that Bell’s lead when it comes to the speed of their Internet offerings is only going to increase, and conversely Rogers will continue to be on the back foot desperately trying to catch up. It also does it solve the issue of Rogers customers who can’t get above 1 Gbps looking at Bell and saying “Bell’s speeds destroy’s anything that Rogers has to offer. Let’s switch to them.”

So while this release from Rogers, and the one that they put out earlier this week sound good. They’re really meaningless as these moves from Rogers do nothing to help existing and loyal Rogers customers get a competitive Internet product from the telco. And that’s going to bite Rogers sooner rather than later.

This entry was posted on April 21, 2022 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Rogers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.