TELECOMS FORCED TO DESIGN OUTAGE BACKUP PLAN
Minister orders probe, changes after massive Rogers crash
Following a massive Rogers outage that saw millions of Canadians lose internet and wireless service for hours on end last week, the federal government says it will force Canada’s largest telecom companies to work together to provide backup for one another during future system crashes.
Innovation Minister François-philippe Champagne said Monday that telecoms have been given 60 days to come up with formal agreements on emergency roaming, mutual assistance in outages, and a protocol for communicating with the public and authorities during widespread disruptions.
Champagne said he spoke with representatives from seven telecom companies — Rogers, Telus, Bell, Videotron, Shaw, Sasktel and Eastlink — for nearly an hour on Monday. “The focus of the call was very much around resiliency of our network across Canada,” he said.
Champagne said the government also expects the CRTC regulator to investigate the outage, which lasted through all of Friday and, for some customers, lasted into the weekend. Rogers going completely off-line impacted retail payment systems and other business operations across the country and left people unable to call 911. The minister told reporters the CRTC would “investigate the root cause of the failure and make additional recommendations.” He said the telecom companies agreed to co-operate with that inquiry. He also said he expects Rogers to “proactively and fully compensate” affected customers.
John Lawford, executive director of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, which on Friday had called on the CRTC to hold an inquiry, supported using regulatory powers to make the companies work together. That would include looking into having other providers provide data capacity so people can call 911 in an emergency. “Maybe we should have rules about them having a Plan B where they have to co-operate,” he said.
Vass Bednar, who lectures on technology and public policy at Mcmaster University, said Canada should use the outage as a learning opportunity to improve the telecom system.
“I’d love to see us kind of bounce back a little stronger, a little shinier,” she said. “Can the providers ... co-ordinate more so that we have a better backup plan when people can’t access 911?”
The Rogers outage, its second massive extended outage in 15 months, has increased calls for more competition in Canada’s confined telecom industry. While industry observers said more competition could help lower prices and provide choice in the market, they cautioned that it isn’t necessarily the solution to major service interruptions like last week’s.
Canada has three big players that dominate the national wireless market, Bell, Rogers and Telus. But when it comes to wireline networks, most regions of the country really only have two, the traditional cableco and the telco. Telus and Bell began as phone companies in Western and Eastern Canada, respectively, while cable TV companies Shaw and Rogers built out cable networks. Both rely on networks built across large regions over decades, at significant cost. Building a whole new national wireline network from scratch is an expensive proposition, especially in a geographically large country with a small population. No would-be competitor has ever proposed doing so.
Instead, much of the focus on increasing competition in Canada’s telecom market is on wholesale-based competition — changing the regulatory rules to make it easier for companies to buy wholesale access to those already existing wireline networks. So, when Rogers went down on Friday, customers of competitors who rely on Rogers networks went down, too.
Besides, notes telecom researcher Ben Klass, while more competition makes it more attractive for people to switch their long-term provider, it does not help them in the immediate term when their current network provider goes down. Canadians won’t want to have to switch providers every time their service is disrupted.
“That’s not a reasonable solution. So part of it has to be efforts to improve resilience and redundancy in the network,” he said.
There are, however, other options, said Bednar, like emerging low-earth orbit satellite systems and municipally-owned broadband networks that can help add backups and redundancy.
“I think small changes can be really meaningful, too,” she said.