Rogers Communications has just appointed a new manager as Chief Technology Officer. The leadership change comes two weeks after the network outage affected more than 10 million customers and hundreds of thousands of businesses.
Posted at 10:58 a.m.
Updated at 11:29 a.m.
Ron McKenzie becomes Chief Information and Technology Officer replacing Jorge Fernandes.
Joined by The Pressa spokeswoman for Rogers did not wish to offer an explanation surrounding this change in management.
The Press revealed last week that on the day of the outage, July 8, Jorge Fernandes was out of the country. According to our information, he was in Portugal.
In the days following the outage, Rogers management explained that the July 8 event was caused by a maintenance update to its backbone network. After beginning at dawn on Friday, July 8, the outage lasted all day, and service began to recover by evening. Full recovery, however, was not achieved until the following days.
In a report published by The Press last week, Pierre C. Bélanger, professor at the University of Ottawa and specialist in the regulation of communications and telecommunications, had pointed out that the outage had occurred at a time of the year when the chief engineer could be on vacation .
Last year, a failure caused by a software update from its partner Ericsson disrupted services at Rogers for 16 hours. This update caused devices to disconnect from the network.
It was Jorge Fernandes who had publicly apologized to customers and provided explanations in an official letter. Last week, CEO Tony Staffieri signed the public statement released in the wake of the July 8 outage.
After describing the July 8 interruption of services as “unacceptable”, the Federal Minister of Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, last week asked the leaders of the country’s telecommunications companies to reach a formal agreement within 60 days on emergency roaming and mutual assistance during outages, as well as developing a communication protocol to better inform the public and authorities during an emergency.
The July 8 outage came as Rogers seeks regulatory approval to acquire rival Shaw, a deal valued at $26 billion including debt. The Competition Bureau opposes the transaction, arguing in particular that the merger would result in higher prices and lower quality of service.
In his new role as Chief Technology Officer at Rogers, Ron McKenzie leads a team of engineers, developers and technology specialists. He previously served as President of Business Services at Rogers.
Prior to this role, Ron McKenzie led the Technical Operations team at Rogers where he was responsible for installation, service and maintenance, and technical support for wireless and wireline services.