Canada’s telecommunications watchdog orders Rogers to explain in detail the ins and outs of the widespread blackout that affected millions of people last week while making it difficult to access emergency services and banking .
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said on Tuesday that it has asked Rogers to respond by July 22 to questions that were sent to the company, including on the “why” and “how” of breakdown, and to detail the measures put in place to prevent such a situation from happening again.
CRTC Chairman Ian Scott said in a statement that this is the first step the federal agency will take to improve the resilience of Canada’s cellular network. “Events of this magnitude, which cripple parts of our country’s economy and jeopardize the safety of Canadians, are simply unacceptable. »
This request comes a day after the Federal Minister of Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, had announced that the CRTC would investigate the outage. He met Monday with Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri and executives from several other telecommunications providers.
During this meeting, Mr. Champagne asked the companies to submit to him a crisis plan which includes, among other things, agreements on emergency roaming, a framework for “mutual assistance” during outages and a communication protocol for “better inform the public and the authorities”.
Some Concerns
This requirement, however, poses the risk that a competitor’s network will be overwhelmed and that the service will ultimately be degraded, fears a former telecommunications executive.
Former Telus finance chief Robert McFarlane said that while devising a strategy to ensure everyone’s phones can work on other networks in the event of a service outage makes “tremendous sense”, providers will need to be very thoughtful in their approach.
Tricky questions could emerge about whether or not a provider should favor its own customers over those who use that provider as a backup in an emergency, he explained.
McFarlane also said that if Quebecor were successful in acquiring Freedom Mobile, the Shaw-owned wireless carrier, the Montreal-based company could increase its national presence and strengthen its business, which would open the door for Rogers and Quebecor become a relief network for each other.
The deadline for Rogers, Shaw and Quebecor to reach a definitive agreement on the sale of Freedom is July 15.
Empower consumers
Dwayne Winseck, a professor at Carleton University, believes that consumers could have more power in emergency situations if they had the option of temporarily switching to another network on their own. He thinks that Google’s mobile virtual network operator service in the United States, Google Fi, which allows people to switch operators using a web application, might be worth reproducing here. in Canada.
“For emergency situations, the government and the CRTC could impose daily roaming charges for subscribers who have hopped onto another network,” he said.
The feds are giving telecom companies that participated in Monday’s meeting about two months to develop a clear network resilience plan. If suppliers are unable to establish one within that timeframe, the professor thinks there are some levers Ottawa could pull. “It can pass an order under section 8 of the Telecommunications Act. It can also impose such obligations as license conditions in the next spectrum auction round,” he suggested.
The Minister of Industry could also factor the lack of a comprehensive resilience plan into his ongoing review of Rogers’ $26 billion takeover bid to buy Shaw and, in doing so, ” tip the scales against the deal,” adds Professor Winseck.