A question on ISP coverage

[Mhorydyn]

In my ongoing quest to find an ISP with upload speeds greater than my current 50 Mbps, I've run across an odd situation. Rogers has somewhat recently started offering cable plans with 2 Gbps down and 200Mbps up. Yay! Well, sort of. Their online tool doesn't offer those plans as an option when I punch in my address. But, when I put in the address of a house just across the street of the adjacent T intersection, it does. I've spent far too longer with various tiers of customer service failing to find an answer to my question, basically always ending at either 'try this other number' or 'yea, the tool shows we don't offer that service there'.

I mapped out my neighbourhood to see what's available and where, and it ends up with this little corner of suburbia that doesn't offer those plans even though the whole area was part of the same development and built ~7 years ago now. Each North to South street contains roughly 10 houses, for reference. Any idea if there'd be a technical reason for this or if it's more of an issue with the address lookup tool? (or something else entirely).

(tagging @SandyTech as I recall many posts about ISP-related shenanigans)

 

[Lord Evermore]

Was every street/house built at the same time, and cable connectivity run by Rogers to the whole area at once? What's the surrounding area like? Is the sub-division off by itself or is it within a larger residential area? It's possible that they connected up one section of it using an existing node to make service available immediately, like the first set of homes being built, using a node that served the neighborhood north of the division, but that node might not have been able to handle the addition of the whole new division, and then that gave them time to run a new node to serve the later sets of houses that were built, and now that newer node has been upgraded to support the latest DOCSIS which can support the higher speeds but they haven't yet upgraded the original one (perhaps because they think the users on the newer node are more likely to subscribe to the higher cost service and start paying for the costs of the upgrade more quickly).

Pretty much the only way to verify anything would be to have them send a technician to confirm where your service connects and whether it's a node that supports the new speeds. ISPs are notoriously bad about properly mapping the areas that they serve and what levels of service they provide in those areas (though usually they are making claims about providing better service, or service at all, where they don't). Depending on the exact location of your home relative to the lines that connect to the new node, they might be able and willing to switch you over, and might even switch over that entire section of the sub-division in the process, though it might take time.

 

[Mhorydyn]

Was every street/house built at the same time, and cable connectivity run by Rogers to the whole area at once? What's the surrounding area like? Is the sub-division off by itself or is it within a larger residential area? It's possible that they connected up one section of it using an existing node to make service available immediately, like the first set of homes being built, using a node that served the neighborhood north of the division, but that node might not have been able to handle the addition of the whole new division, and then that gave them time to run a new node to serve the later sets of houses that were built, and now that newer node has been upgraded to support the latest DOCSIS which can support the higher speeds but they haven't yet upgraded the original one (perhaps because they think the users on the newer node are more likely to subscribe to the higher cost service and start paying for the costs of the upgrade more quickly).

There's nothing to the west or north in that image, with the only way in being one of those three roads in green. I'm not sure exactly when the roads were built but they were before the development by a good while. There are some homes built a few years before mine with 2G service (southwest) but then there are also homes built a year or so after mine (east) with 2G service as well. I'll focus my efforts on trying to get a service tech out there I suppose, although they don't seem super keen on it given that I'm not a customer.

 

[Kyuu]

It's impossible to speculate as to the specifics of what's going on in your neighborhood without access to way more information. I never worked for a cable company, but I did work for AT&T for about a decade. It was far from uncommon for a situation like yours to arise, where due to the way the build out was conducted a neighborhood was generally able to be hooked up to the new VDSL-hotness (this was back in the late 2000s/early 2010s) or fiber but a certain sub-division of that neighborhood wasn't part of that infrastructure and all we could offer was ADSL (and they were always 15 miles from the CO and could barely get 768k). It's also far from impossible that the records the lookup tool is referencing are simply out-of-date or have errors. Occasionally I was successful in getting engineering sent out to take a look when I suspected that was the case, which was the only way to correct the problem.

Unless Rogers is way more magnanimous than AT&T I suspect you have an uphill battle even if the issue is erroneous records. Good luck.

 

[KD5MDK]

What plans does it offer to you, and can you sign up for one of those and cancel if when you actually do the hookup it is limited to the <200Mb up plan?

Rogers and asymmetric makes me think cable modem, so it could be that the equipment in the nearest box on your corner is older and hasn't been upgraded, but all the others were for whatever availability/failure/etc reason. Maybe the best possible outcome is the tech gets out to you, looks in their cabinet and says "This unit is filled with black flies and will fail at any minute, we need a new one".

 

[Lord Evermore]

"This unit is filled with black flies and will fail at any minute, we need a new one".

"They don't even train us on this equipment anymore."

 

[goates]

Do any of the smaller ISPs, such as Teksavvy, Cogeco or Lightspeed (or whichever ones are in your area), offer service in your area? Could try their online tools to see if they offer cable service to your house. As they all use the base infrastructure from Rogers, Bell or Telus, if they offer service, it usually means the relevant Big 3 do too (Rogers for cable, Telus and Bell for DSL or fibre).