 corsterPremium
join:2002-02-23
Gatineau, QC | reply to AR
Re: Fibe TV --- WOW! 8 years of Rogers cable OVER! Fibe TV is a fantastic product as far as conventional television goes, but forcing it to be bundled with their Internet service just absolutely kills the deal. |
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| reply to AR
Anyone who has Rogers notices this difference or good quality after the switch...be it OTA or Bell. Also notice the 5.1 sound also. Its really nice compared to Rogers Cable. |
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jfmezeiPremium
join:2007-01-03
Pointe-Claire, QC
kudos:22 | FibTV only requires something like 5 to 7 mbps of bandwidth which is fairly easy to accomplish when you have remotes that are less than 1km away.
Bell's superiority comes not only because of more modern software in its STBs (unfortunatly from Microsoft), but also because of the multicast and x.264 nature of the feeds which require far less bandwitdh in its distribution network.
So far, cable's deployment of switched channels has been onlyu a bit of icing on the cake to allow supporting a few more channels instead of a significant switch from broadcast to multicast.
Bell started with 100% on demand/multicast distribution where only channels watched and sent to subscribers.
Long term, cable companies may have to create as many SDV channels as there are subscribers per cell so that each subscriber can watch on-demand programming, with sharing capacbilities when popular programs are watched by many in a neighbourhood (news, superbowl, hockey games).
And the service may move more from linear broadcasting to a pure on demand, even for live events. You may not get Hockey Night from the CBC, you might get it directly from NHL. And you wont get some CSI cop show from WCAX in Burlington, you would get it from CBS.COM via your cable provider. |
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 ARPremium,ExMod 2001-04
join:2000-09-21
Toronto, ON | reply to corster
said by corster:Fibe TV is a fantastic product as far as conventional television goes, but forcing it to be bundled with their Internet service just absolutely kills the deal.
Only if you're a huge internet user. For me, I barely use 2 Gigs per month.
But I do agree in some sense.....they're charging me a lot for the internet that I don't use much. The base rate for TV is $56 and the rate for internet is $54! |
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 pnjunctionTeksavvy ExtremePremium
join:2008-01-24
Toronto, ON
kudos:1 | reply to Wolfie00
said by Wolfie00:= My son who is an avid gamer is enjoying 50 Mbps service from Rogers.
Well for gaming he's enjoying a fraction of one of those megabits anyways. Gaming doesn't take much bandwidth at all, latency is all what matters and ADSL2 or VDSL2 is competitive with cable in that regard as far as I know. Old ADSL could be bad and add 30ms if you got put on 'interleaved' profile, but I see numbers around 7-15ms for both cable and DSL2 these days for folks close enough to the test servers. |
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 dirtyjefferAnons on ignore, but not due to fear.Premium
join:2002-02-21
London, ON | reply to urbanriot
said by urbanriot:Yea, I'm aware of the favourite lists but I was hoping I could relay a less involved method of advising friends and family on how they can filter out the undesirable show names as I have plenty that don't know this. Thanks guys!
if you don't want to set up a favourite list, and simply want to see only the subscribed channels, that is the easiest method...all you do is hit Guide until it says "All Sub"...there is nothing to set up, and if there are no favourites set up, it simply toggles between "All sub" and All Chan" (for all channels).
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People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
- George Orwell |
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ARPremium,ExMod 2001-04
join:2000-09-21
Toronto, ON | reply to pnjunction
Agreed. Some of my best gaming moments playing Rogue Spear were on IDSL at a solid 144k/144k and the ping times were fantastic! Back in 2000 in University days. That's how my As went to Bs, my C grades became Ds!
Then even with 768k ADSL from Atlantech were great ping times.
It all went to sh*t with SBC and their "faster" 1.5Mbps version. I played a lot of BF 1942 and it wasn't too good. |
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dirtyjefferAnons on ignore, but not due to fear.Premium
join:2002-02-21
London, ON | i played a ton of BF 1942 and BF2 (actually was quite highly ranked globally)...i just started getting into BF3...it is MUCH more difficult than the previous franchises and much more realistic to what "real life" would be like...i like that part, but also hate it (as it is much harder). |
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 Wolfie00My dog is an elitistPremium
join:2005-03-12
kudos:5 | reply to pnjunction
Depends on the game. The main motivation for going to the 50 Mbps tier was he needed the increased upstream bandwidth for some of the things he was doing, and also the increased monthly cap. I agree that in gaming latency is critical, and in general latency tends to be inversely proportional to bandwidth, although I don't know how much different it is for the 50 Mbps tier compared to some of the lower ones. |
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 nitzguyPremium
join:2002-07-11
Sudbury, ON
 ·TekSavvy DSL
| said by Wolfie00:Depends on the game. The main motivation for going to the 50 Mbps tier was he needed the increased upstream bandwidth for some of the things he was doing, and also the increased monthly cap. I agree that in gaming latency is critical, and in general latency tends to be inversely proportional to bandwidth, although I don't know how much different it is for the 50 Mbps tier compared to some of the lower ones.
I've had low latency on a 128/64k cable connection from Mountain Cable back in 2004...about 20ms ping times....sure I couldn't do anything else, but it was fine for what I wanted to do (used to be big in Starcraft, not that I was globally ranked, but I could hold my own for the most part)...
So I don't believe that you need 30+mbps to be the LPB... |
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 IanPremium
join:2002-06-18
ON
kudos:1
 ·Rogers Hi-Speed
| reply to Wolfie00
said by Wolfie00:I agree that in gaming latency is critical, and in general latency tends to be inversely proportional to bandwidth, although I don't know how much different it is for the 50 Mbps tier compared to some of the lower ones.
Only to a point. Bandwidth really only helps if the packets being sent and received are large enough to matter. Otherwise it's hops, congestion, packet loss, and yes, speed of light.
Most gamers I know have always had better latency on DSL type of platforms than cable. Especially with consistency. With cable, you can still get over-capacity problems if every one of your neighbours decides to make use of that nice big bandwidth and download a bunch of torrents or what-not.
A fairly normal packet size for gaming would be 2KBs of data to receive. 5 Meg DSL connection would do so in 3 milliseconds vs. 0.3 milliseconds for a 50 Mb connection. 10 times faster sure, but given that 30 milliseconds and up are normal round-trip pings for gaming, not the biggest issue.
Heck, if you're playing in Toronto and the server is in LA, just speed of light is taking 12 milliseconds each way, for a round trip of 24 ms.
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“Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency.” – David Wong |
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dirtyjefferAnons on ignore, but not due to fear.Premium
join:2002-02-21
London, ON | said by Ian:Heck, if you're playing in Toronto and the server is in LA, just speed of light is taking 12 milliseconds each way, for a round trip of 24 ms.
Toronto to LA and back is 4400 miles...light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles per second...that means light would make the round trip in about 2.5 ms not 12 ms. |
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Wolfie00My dog is an elitistPremium
join:2005-03-12
kudos:5 | No, about 24 ms is right, assuming a very direct path, otherwise longer. In any case, the 50 mbps tier as I said wasn't about latency but about the upstream and caps. There was a huge improvement in latency back in the day when I went from dialup to the first Rogers broadband service @ 3 mbps and I'm sure it's been diminishing returns as speeds have gone up.
Node congestion can indeed be a problem with cable but I haven't experienced much congestion. The North York area node I was on briefly got busy for awhile but Rogers seemed to quickly repartition it. |
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| reply to Spike
said by Spike:I wish you could filter out channels you DO receive too, get all that damn PPV garbage (some you don't want your kids reading) that you don't want out of the guide. Its far cheaper to walk to the store and rent something. Scammers.
My Bell Sat dish with PVR that I had for almost 10 years now could do that. My new 2 year old HD-PVR as well. You just create a favourites list in the guide. I wouldn't think that was such a big deal. |
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dirtyjefferAnons on ignore, but not due to fear.Premium
join:2002-02-21
London, ON | reply to Wolfie00
said by Wolfie00:No, about 24 ms is right, assuming a very direct path, otherwise longer.
my bad...i was thinking there was 100 ms per second, not 1000. |
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bt
join:2009-02-26
canada
kudos:1 Reviews:
·Start Communicat..
| reply to dirtyjeffer
said by dirtyjeffer:said by AR:But as a product, I feel it's better than cable TV.
it is, because its new...give it time...it's a very "cat and mouse" industry where they jockey back and forth for "the best". Considering some of the recent Rogers improvements (on only the newest receivers) are features that Bell satellite has had for 15 years.... |
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 FaxCap
join:2002-05-25
Surrey, BC
·Shaw
| reply to AR
If it wasn't for the fact $46 of my maintenance fees are for the full
digital package I would go back to ExpressVu. I'm in a bareland
strata where I own the house and land but it's inside a common land
strata. So I would have no trouble putting up a sat dish.
My Shaw cable box is the latest model PVR but it's ergonomics are
quite a bit worse than my Bell-EV box of about 4 years ago.
FaxCap |
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decxPremium
join:2002-06-07
Vancouver, BC | said by FaxCap:If it wasn't for the fact $46 of my maintenance fees are for the full
digital package I would go back to ExpressVu. I'm in a bareland
strata where I own the house and land but it's inside a common land
strata. So I would have no trouble putting up a sat dish.
My Shaw cable box is the latest model PVR but it's ergonomics are
quite a bit worse than my Bell-EV box of about 4 years ago.
FaxCap
The Arris Gateway/Player combination that Shaw is using is pretty impressive. The guide system is fairly good and the 6 tuner PVR is the icing on the cake. It's one of the best STBs currently in use. |
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| reply to Jethro86
There was a time when ExpressVu had receivers where you could toggle between "all" and "subscribed" channels in the program guide.
My current Shaw Direct receiver sort of does that: it lists all the channels in the guide but greys out the ones you don't subscribe to. I'd still rather have them not show up at all.
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"It's all coming down!!" - Mike Holmes |
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| reply to corster
said by corster:Fibe TV is a fantastic product as far as conventional television goes, but forcing it to be bundled with their Internet service just absolutely kills the deal.
I will soon have DISH satellite TV with more than 350 channels for about $30 every 3 months, my cousin has that and is going to hook me up to his dish middle man, stay tuned. |
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