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TORONTO, Canada-Don't count on Rogers Cable sending its high-speed traffic across Shaw Ventures' Big Pipe. Canada's largest MSO already has a national fiber route connecting its systems, says Dermot O'Carroll, the company's senior vice president of network engineering and operations. Hence it has no need for anybody else's pipe.
What Rogers would like is a bit more control, specifically over its Rogers@Home cable modem traffic. That's because the equipment that handles this traffic belongs to and is managed by @Home, even though it's housed in over 20 Rogers primary hubs. As a result, whenever a Rogers-based @Home router has a problem, the fault report goes south to @Home, rather than to the Rogers technician a few feet away.
In an ideal world, this might not be a problem. But this is not an ideal world, and @Home is not immune to equipment failures. In fact, as far as many Rogers@Home subscribers are concerned, the @Home network is regularly plagued with outages. For instance, a failure that occurred between January 14-16, 2001, kept 20,000 of them off the Web. Meanwhile, back in October 2000, problems associated with @Home's e-mail server upgrade caused intermittent messaging slowdowns for weeks, as well as losses of actual e-mail files.
Fed up with these outages, and the negative media attention that has accompanied them, Rogers now wants "operational and management responsibility" for Rogers@Home's "IP layer," says O'Carroll. This means signal routing, switching, DHCP/DNS and caching, the signal management process that keeps Internet traffic moving.
Asked why @Home should hand over Rogers@Home's operations to Rogers, O'Carroll replies, "Because we're here. They're our customers ... (and when Rogers@Home problems arise) we can be more focused on it, and in responding to it." He adds, "I would hope to do this within the next 6 to 8 months."
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