What if, to avoid a new outage that would paralyze Internet services in the country, the solution was to nationalize the telecommunications infrastructure? Or in their decentralization? After the damage last Friday at Rogers, which gave headaches to many citizens, two experts contacted by The duty speak out.
“It shows a lack of organization in the company which is really very serious. With more than 40 years of expertise in Canadian telecommunications and today a consultant for help centers for technology companies, Robert Proulx does not understand how a breakdown of such magnitude could have occurred at Rogers. Especially since it is the second in less than two years, another having occurred on April 19, 2021.
In the eyes of this MIT graduate, the nationalization of the country’s telecommunications infrastructure would be “of phenomenal complexity” and difficult to envisage as its cost would be high. “And anyway, I doubt that federal civil servants can do better than current employees,” he notes.
But according to him, the government has other levers to strengthen the network. “Rather than nationalizing, suppliers should be required to provide terms of service that ensure the resilience of the network. This could include, for example, guarantees of redundancy, ie obliging large companies to have alternative systems or settings that can be used in the event of failure. “We cannot offer services like 911 without these guarantees,” says Mr. Proulx.
Another such condition could be to force the telecommunications giants — Rogers, Bell and Telus — to help each other in the event of a major outage. “I don’t know how it could be done, but we must have a reliable and resilient network,” reiterates the expert.
And if a complete nationalization of these infrastructures seems unrealistic, at least in the short term, an intermediate option could be envisaged. “Nationalizing wires and poles would be a great idea,” he says. Sometimes, in the streets, the companies have each installed their fiber optic cables, when a single pair of cables would do the trick. The equipment ensuring the stability of the network (routers, for example) would however be much more complicated to nationalize, since each company has its own equipment and its own centres.
Decentralize, another vision
But some aspire to structural changes in the world of telecommunications. This is the case of Mathieu Gauthier-Pilote, president of the organization FACIL, which militates in favor of free computing, that is to say outside the control of the major digital players.
Although not totally closed to the idea of a nationalization of Internet services, he rather proposes a decentralization. “What we must promote is that the Internet is a common good that has no owner, therefore neither the State nor the companies”, he explains. And if the public authorities have a role to play, “we would see it more at the level of the municipalities, which could participate in offering access to general communications, including the telephone”.
He cites as an example the case of the guifi.net network, which was created in 2009 in Catalonia. “People put an antenna on their roof and they had the equipment so that their antenna could communicate with that of their neighbours, all through a decentralized architecture,” he says. People provide their own Internet access. Such an organization would multiply the local access points, which would necessarily limit the damage when a breakdown occurs at a major supplier, such as Rogers.
Different avenues therefore exist to strengthen the stability of the network. And since Ottawa announced on Monday the launch of an investigation into Friday’s blackout, Rogers will not escape a serious examination of its practices.