Competition pushes Rogers to increase Internet speeds in New Brunswick
If you don’t believe competition works in the digital services marketplace then consider the case of high speed internet service in Fredericton and Saint John, New Brunswick.
Last week, Rogers Communications announced that it is now offering customers in those two cities an improved Ultimate Internet plan with download speeds of up to 70 Mbps, up from 50 Mbps.
The increased download speed comes just two months after Rogers launched the $99 a month Ultimate High-Speed Internet service in Fredericton and Saint John. The plans upload speeds and bandwidth cap remain fixed at 2 Mbps and 175GB per month respectively.
So why is Rogers introducing and improving its internet plans so quickly in Fredericton and Saint John? The answer is competition.
By the middle of 2010, 70,000 homes in Fredericton and Saint John New Brunswick will have the fastest broadband connections in the country thanks to fibre to the home (FTTH) technology but it won’t come from Rogers rather it will come from Bell Aliant.
That’s because in December, the month Rogers launched its Ultimate service with 50 Mbps download speeds in Fredericton and Saint John, Bell Aliant announced that it would begin offering customers in Fredericton and Saint John internet services with download speeds of up to 60Mbps and upload speeds approaching 15Mbps in January 2010.
In addition, thanks to an $80 million investment, Bell Aliant expects to bring FTTH technology to 110,000 – or 35 per cent – of the homes and business in New Brunswick by mid-2010. Looking forward to mid-2011, Bell expects to be able to offer the improved service to 145,000 or 45 per cent, of homes and businesses in the province.
The result is customers in the rest of New Brunswick can expect to see Rogers aggressively roll out Ultimate service to the rest of the province.
Discuss in Digital Home’s High Speed Internet forum.
So at 175gb cap why would you pay $99 ?
with 175gb in 30 days gives you just a bit more then 640k dsl line speed.
Paul.
Rogers doesn’t get it, though. The biggest appeal of Aliant’s offering is that it has no transfer caps and no throttling. It actually works as advertised.
Rogers will sell you a really high speed connection, as long as you don’t use it for anything. If you do, they’ll throttle it into the ground with traffic shaping, then slap a far too low transfer cap on it.
They’re going to get their lunch handed to them by Aliant in this market.
The other aspect is the Rogers service is an up to shared offering – with DOCSIS they can only get so much bandwidth to a neighborhood…so if you and your neighbor both get 70Mbps you’re pretty much just giving Rogers’ free money because the speeds you’ll get best case are not going to be anywhere near advertised. Other aspect is, the Upload on this service is terrible…2Mbps for $100, plus a modem charge, plus a service charge, plus whatever else Rogers put on my bill last time. I’m waiting for FibreOP. My friends have it in Fredericton and I have friends on the West side of Saint John getting installed this week. Its WAY FASTER than anything Rogers “Advertised”