Bell versus Rogers network performance under high demand

I'm curious if you'd have different results if you were signed up with Rogers core brand (or a Rogers MVNO) rather than via Fido. There are indications that Rogers degrades service for Fido customers and your experiences may be reflective of that.

middleofnowhere wrote: ↑ I'm curious if you'd have different results if you were signed up with Rogers core brand (or a Rogers MVNO) rather than via Fido. There are indications that Rogers degrades service for Fido customers and your experiences may be reflective of that.

I have seen that on occasion, including very recently. But each time, when it comes to displaying consistent objective evidence, every claim seems to come up short on both showing an effect and eliminating other causes.

The problem with intermittent and brief drops in performance is that you'd need a special app that will frequently sample performance in order to catch the drops and how severe they are. Manually running benchmarks is a challenging way to catch it in action.

In the early days of HSPA in Canada, it was a bit easier to spot because throughput would completely stall (not just slow down) on Rogers. I saw an article explaining why: in order to maintain compatibility with 2G GSM, Rogers continued using the older SMS control subchannel that was originally for call control. So, with the rise of SMS, it didn't take a lot of traffic for SMS to block call initiation. I don't remember how it affected data. But Bell/Telus started with 3G using fully dynamic protocols. I expect that there were more reasons behind the scenes, and I'm going from memory of someone else' technical explanation, but the net effect is that Rogers would become nearly useless with even moderate traffic while Bell/Telus would not bog down until things became severe. I'm seeing a parallel to that lately with LTE data speeds.

Well, Rogers LTE pipes are smaller compared to the Bell/TELUS network.

The best combination of bands in the Greater Toronto Area for Carrier Aggregation on Rogers I've seen on my Samsung Galaxy S9 is bands 2 (15 MHz) + 4 (15 MHz) + 7 (20 MHz) + 12 (10 MHz) for a total of 60 MHz of bandwidth.

When my Samsung Galaxy S9 was on Koodo and then TELUS, the best I saw was bands 2 (20 MHz) + 4 (15 MHz) + 7 2850 (20 MHz) + 7 3350 (20 MHz) for a total of 75 MHz.

A Bell cellular engineer in May this year confirmed those are the best combinations for the Big 3 in the GTA.

There's a reason Rogers finishes consistently 3rd behind TELUS and Bell for their data speeds for the past 4-5 years.

TELUS and Bell networks are superior, thus you will get better speeds OVERALL. Obviously some spots Rogers will be great while TELUS and Bell will be shit.

Bellus is the best for network/speed/connection (voice)

Rogers is 2nd