Thursday, August 1, 2013

Rogers versus MTS

Hmmm … Rogers is running quickly this morning …



MTS not so much …



To be fair, I subscribe to Rogers’ Extreme Plus, which advertises 45Mbps down and 4Mbps up, while my sister (MTS) subscribes to Lite 10, which advertises 10Mbps down and 2Mbps up.

But I’m getting 50% more download bandwidth and a tiny fraction more upload bandwidth, whereas my sister is getting about 80% LESS than she pays for on downloads and 66% LESS than she pays for on uploads. And further, the price for Extreme Plus is only 22 dollars higher than the price for Lite 10, which means that Rogers is miles ahead in bandwidth for the dollar. It is not even a contest …

I am not impressed at all by MTS … while Rogers continues to please and impress, at least in the technology department.

Note: If you are wondering how I measured these speeds in two cities at the same time, I simply tunnelled through the Internet.

Edit: We called about this and MTS said that they were on the "classic" TV / Internet system and thus 5% of the paid for bandwidth was all we could get. My sister correctly pointed out that MTS happily took the full price for 10Mbps though, to which she got no answer. Anyway, the only solution is to upgrade to the Ultimate system and get the whole home PVR and all the goodies. They will finally have HD, which is great. They upgraded to the 20Mbps (embarrassingly, the fastest MTS offers for any price in their neighbourhood) which will allow proper streaming finally. I must admit that the choices in Winnipeg are extremely poor when I compare with Rogers and Bell in Ottawa. Shaw and MTS are way behind the technology curve and their service is apparently no better. But, it is a captive market and that is how the world works, apparently.