This is done for a couple of reasons.

1. The lower channel numbers remain for those people familiar with those numbers from many years ago when TV was analogue, so a number of providers keep them.

2. The second channel number is for "groupings" like News, Sports, Kids, Movies, Timeshifting, Religion, Science, Foreign, etc.

This doesn't take up additional bandwidth if it's the same original channel.

Yes when you set a recording with IgniteTV, it goes to the lowest equivalent channel number, just because that's the way IgniteTV works.

 

Originally, the newly added digital channels in the 100s mirrored the analog channels below 100 and some extra digital channels were added. That was for the original digital service. Since then, the analog channels were dropped and remapped to digital channels and a lot of extra channels above 100 were added. A lot of new SD channels, many in the 200s and 300s were later added. HD channels and some SD channels were added above 300 up to the high 900s. Since then, a lot of SD channels were remapped to HD for people with HD receivers so that just about every channels looks like it's HD, even if it shows up in SD on and SD receiver. That created a lot of duplicated HD channels Some SD channels remain, mostly in the 100s and 200s. That's an oversimplification but provides the general timeline.

Channels or groups of channels tend to be organized by the first digit. 300s and 400s tend to be specialty sports channels. Channels in the high 400s and 500s are mostly broadcast stations, the mid to high 500s are mostly specialty stations, the 600s and up are mostly music and non-English channels. That's not absolute as there were not always enough space to fit new channels in a single general assignment or sequence. Channels in theme packs tend to be grouped together on the 10s but that has be thrown off by the reorganization of themes and channel rebranding. Again, that's a generalization in all respects. The history of channel assignments on Rogers and the reasons behind them could fill a book.

 

@ExDilbert : The OP has IgniteTV and the channel numbers are different from legacy digital cable. For example Stingray is now 370-410, many of the channels that used to be in the 500s are now in the 200s and 300s, most of the music channels in the 900s are gone, etc.

The nice thing about IgniteTV is you no longer need to remember channel numbers - you just say CTV or Crave, or CBS, etc into your voice command.

The voice commands also work for apps like Crave or Disney+ or Netflix, etc. if you subscribe through Rogers. You can say "Car SOS, season 1, episode 5 on Disney+" and you are one click away from watching that episode.

 

I missed the part about it being Ignite. I would expect the Ignite channel lineup to be different and I'm a little surprised to see how similar they are in some respects. It would make sense to eliminate inconsistencies and other issues with the Digital TV lineup. The fact that Rogers kept some of them shows they are willing to address the needs of legacy customers. I've seen a couple of lineup reorganizations with other providers. They were useful in the long run but inconvenient at first. It also wasn't a permanent solution as many inconsistencies were created later on. In any event, I did address the issue the OP raised as to why some channels are duplicated.

As for the voice remote, I avoid using anything voice controlled as it introduces a very powerful tracking and recognition tool. Voice recognition is already being used to track customers and is actively being used by Rogers and other businesses. It's as bad as facial recognition which has been used to identify and discriminate against people for business reasons and may violate their human rights.

 

When I had Rogers I never used the Voice remote feature. I just don't like it. Some may love it but not me.

 

I use it occasionally, but generally just use the remote to enter the channel number.

 

It can get very confusing at times.

It is still a good thing channels 2-99 are from the analogue cable era.