Industry minister to meet with Rogers CEO after 'unacceptable' network outage
CBC
Canada's industry minister will convene a meeting with the leader of Rogers Communications in the wake of a massive outage that paralyzed the company's network and hampered several crucial services, his office announced on Sunday, even as some customers continued to report service disruptions.
A statement released from the office of François-Philippe Champagne said he plans to meet with Tony Staffieri and other telecom leaders to discuss the importance of improving "the reliability of networks across Canada."
The statement said Champagne found last week's widespread service disruption — which lasted at least 15 hours and knocked out access to numerous law enforcement, health-care and banking services — "unacceptable," adding he has expressed that view directly to Staffieri.
"These services are vitally important for Canadians in their day-to-day life and we expect our telecom industry to meet the highest standards that Canadians rightly deserve," the statement read.
Staffieri released a statement on Saturday attributing Friday's widespread outage to a network system failure following a maintenance update, adding that the "vast majority" of customers were back online.
Meanwhile, a consumer group made a formal request to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to hold an inquiry into the outage.
Public Interest Advocacy Centre executive director John Lawford said the CRTC would be able to obtain information and documents from Rogers that the public couldn't access and make recommendations to Rogers about how to prevent future outages.
"Happening during apparently routine maintenance makes this very suspect, because you would like to hope that they would do their maintenance in a fashion that wouldn't risk the whole network," Lawford told CBC News Network on Sunday.
His organization also asked the CRTC to consider new regulatory responsibilities for all telecommunications providers regarding their communication with customers, compensation requirements and ensuring access was maintained to the 911 system in the case of an outage.
"Wouldn't it be great if the companies, at the end of this, got a roadmap from the CRTC that said if you have an outage, you are allowed to borrow some part of another network's capacity to continue essential services during your outage?" Lawford said.
Many customers continued reporting service disruptions into Sunday, including Courtice, Ont., resident Paul Platt, who said his home wireless network was only restored after being down for more than 48 hours.
Platt said many of the appliances in his home, including some lights, locks and smoke detectors, depend on an internet connection to function.
"Nothing was working in my house at all," he said.
Platt said he checked in on his elderly neighbours — one with Parkinson's disease and another who recently had heart surgery — every few hours over the weekend, noting they also rely on Rogers service and wouldn't be able to call 911 if needed.
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