The Canadian public has spoken out about how absolutely muddled Friday’s Rogers failure was, and it looks like the government actually…listened?
After the absolute chaos that ensued Friday – with tens of thousands of customers across the country unable to communicate, work or even purchase goods and services – people are boycotting the company and demanding that the name of the Rogers Center is changed and that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes some changes, among other things.
And while it’s extremely unlikely that the first claim will ever materialize, it appears the second will indeed materialize.
The fact that so many individuals and companies were absolutely screwed by the blackout showed a lot about how problematic the monopoly of the telecom industry is in Canada – and the Feds are trying to fix that so we never get into a situation like this again ( because based on Rogers’ track record, we know it would be different).
Canadian Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne has unveiled a solution that would require the Big 3 telecom giants to work together in the event of future outages to prevent things from getting as bad as they were last week.
That’s why I brought together today the leaders of the major telecoms to urge them to take immediate action to improve the resilience and reliability of our networks by ensuring that a formal agreement is reached within 60 days.
— François-Philippe Champagne (FPC) 🇨🇦 (@FP_Champagne) July 11, 2022
The minister has asked the companies to come up with some kind of agreement to support each other in such scenarios, to ensure that customers have access to emergency roaming at all times and to implement a communication protocol for handling such problems, which is required to deal with more frequent ones and to include more thorough public updates.
Executives have 60 business days to meet the above requirements, which Champagne described as “a first step” in transforming the industry in Canada.
“Canadians deserve more from their providers in terms of quality and reliability of service, and I will ensure they meet the high standards Canadians have come to expect, including enhancing competition, innovation and affordability,” he wrote Monday afternoon on twitter.
Rogers has attributed the power outage to “a network system failure following a maintenance update on our core network that caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning” and promised to “make any necessary changes” to ensure network stability.
Some people were still without internet, TV and/or WiFi as of Monday night. As compensation, the airline is offering an automatic credit to people’s accounts worth about two days of service.