Rogers Communications has signed an official agreement with SamKnows, the ?leading authority on broadband service availability and independent broadband performance testing,? to measure the performance of its broadband Internet speeds.
The testing will be based on customer data collected in the home and will back up roughly $10 billion in spending from Rogers with respect to infrastructure.
?With Internet usage exploding, speed is more important than ever to the customer experience,? said John Boynton, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, Rogers Communications. ?We are committing to long-term in-home testing as an additional quality measure to ensure customers are getting world-leading Internet experiences.?? We encourage other ISPs to do the same.?
Rogers will be looking to measure customer Internet speeds on a consistent basis to get the most accurate numbers it can. This will involve the use of a Whitebox to plug into existing Internet connections. From the Whitebox, Rogers and SamKnows will be able to measure the upload and download performances of the broadband connections and can monitor things like latency as well.
The Whitebox is a custom hardware device that SamKnows says should be installed to the existing router. It will run a series of tests and apparently doesn?t collect any other data beyond broadband performance information.
SamKnows has worked with the FCC in the United States and Ofcom in the United Kingdom, with an unprecedented contract with the former designed ?to begin a new project researching and collecting data on American fixed-line broadband speeds delivered by Internet Service Providers.? This, according to SamKnows, has never been undertaken in the country before.
The Whitebox certainly has a pedigree that seems reliable and Rogers seems to have partnered with the right company to get the job done right.
?We are excited to have this opportunity to bring the proven SamKnows methodology for measuring broadband speeds to Canada,? said Alex Salter, chairman of SamKnows. ?We will be testing the actual Internet speeds Canadians experience in their homes. We are pleased that Rogers is the first Canadian ISP to commit to such a large home-based testing program.?
There are some questions that remain, however, and Rogers has yet to provide any information about how Whiteboxes will be implemented or distributed.
Along with the Whiteboxes, Rogers has been making some other efforts to reveal the truth about their speeds. They hired LeMay-Yates, an independent telecommunications management and consulting firm, to research how Canada?s actual broadband speeds added up to a global scale ?relative to advertised speeds.? That study found differently than the wide OECD study, the latter of which also ranked price. An interesting discussion of the contrasts in studies could prove useful here.
There are always reasons to remain sceptical when it comes to these sorts of sponsored outings. Rogers? partnership with SamKnows could prove enlightening if it?s transparent enough, but realistically it will probably just provide more substance for those Rogers commercials we all love so much.
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Written by: Jordan Richardson.?www.digitcom.ca. Follow?TheTelecomBlog.com by:?RSS,?Twitter,?Facebook, or?YouTube.
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