On April, 4th, I received a promotional offer from Rogers offering Ignite Internet service at 1.5Gbps plus Streaming for $114.99 per month.
I procrastinated a bit because I wanted to make sure that I can actually make use of this service. However, when I checked my bill for April, I noticed that my total monthly charges is at $102.99.
Note the above price prior to discount is at $117.99. I was curious to see if Rogers can get me a good deal without the Streaming service. I called Rogers support line and received a person who was not very helpful and simply just quoted conditions and deals to me. AI will do a number of these types of people soon.
I decided to try an alternative route by using Twitter (@RogersHelp). I direct messaged Rogers on Twitter and received wonderful help. They offered me the 1.5Gbps service at only $104.99 (with a 24 months commitment). This will be somewhat on par with my current payment and I will get 50% more throughput.
There is another question. Will my networking equipment make use of the 1.5Gbps? My networking setup has the Rogers Ignite WiFi Gateway (ARRIS Group, XB7 Modem) and is connected with a Cat5e cable to my Unifi Dream Machine Pro, using one of its 1Gbps RJ45 port.
How can we overcome the 1Gbps limit on the UDM Pro’s RJ45 port? Luckily the UDM Pro has an 10G SFP+ port as well. I went to Amazon and purchased a 10G SFP+ RJ45 Copper Module Transceiver.
The above will auto negotiate a 2.5Gbps to 10Gbps connection from the XB7 to my UDM Pro. Of course I will not be getting 2.5G or 10G speeds. These are just the physical maximum per the respective devices. Rogers will throttle my inbound and outbound traffic to 1.5Gbps and 50Mbps respectively.
After installing the SFP+ module and rewire the existing Cat5e cable, I had to reboot the both the XB7 modem and the UDM Pro. Once everything came back up, I had another problem. How do I test that I actually get 1.5Gbps? I cannot do it from any WiFi devices or any wired devices in my house because they are all limited to the 1Gbps port speed from my networking switches. Once again, Unifi had thought of this already and provide a speed test functionality on its management dashboard.
So you can see from the above screen shot, that we are now getting what we are paying for. I also performed a double test from two different machines that are routed to a switch that has a 10Gbps connection to my UDM Pro, and each machine received a 700Mbps to 800Mbps download speed, which is around 1.5Gbps in aggregate. Mission accomplished.
Unifi just came out with a new firmware update that enable the UDM Pro to perform load balancing of more than one WAN connection. When the SkyLink service becomes more economically feasible, we can attach a satellite based internet service as a compliment to the existing Rogers service. This way during a power outage, we can continue to get Internet.