On Sunday, July 24, Rogers Communications announced new steps that the company will take to avoid a repeat of what happened during a nationwide service outage on July 8.
Outage Aftermath
In its letter to its customers, Rogers Communication CEO Tony Staffieri outlined the company's enhanced reliability plan in response to the power outage in Canada.
The outage placed millions of Canadians without cellphones and internet service for days, and it prompted questions and concerns from the regulators and the Canadian federal government.
Even 911 calls were disrupted in several parts of the country during the outage, according to Global News.
Staffieri said that Rogers Communications is currently working on a formal agreement with competitors to change 911 calls to each other's networks automatically, even in the event of an outage on any carrier's network.
Rogers Communications has said on its official website that customers can now call 911 without any SIM card, but it is not clear if they would have worked during an outage, according to Q107.
Meanwhile, on the wireless and internet front, Staffieri pledged that the telecommunications company will physically separate those services in order to create an always on network so that customers won't experience any outages at the same time, something that happened to a lot of customers on July 8.
Staffieri also said that Rogers Communications will invest $10 billion over the next three years in oversight, testing, and even artificial intelligence to boost its performance.
The CEO said that it is only through these actions that they can start to restore the confidence of customers in Rogers Communications and earn back their trust.
The letter to customers comes days after a letter the company sent to Canada's broadcasting regulator was released detailing the cause and the aftermath of the outage in the country.
Rogers Communications told the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission or CRTC that coding from an update to its network deleted a routing filter that allows for routes to the internet to pass through the routers.
It has flooded and overwhelmed the main network, causing it to stop processing the internet traffic effectively.
The letter met a deadline by the CRTC for Rogers to answer certain questions about the power outage, but it has a lot of redactions where Rogers Communications is believed to have offered specific details.
Officials from Rogers and other stakeholders are set to appear at a parliamentary committee in Ottawa to further explain the cause of the outage and to outline the steps that they will take to ensure that nothing like this will happen ever again.
MPs to Questions Rogers
According to CBC, François-Philippe Champagne the Innovation, Science and Industry Minister of Canada will appear before a parliamentary committee this July.
He will answer questions about the nationwide service outage of Rogers Communications that has left millions of Canadians offline and affected several critical services.
MPs on the industry and technology committee voted to devote at least two days of study before the end of the month to the Rogers Communications outage, which began on July 8 and stretched into the weekend.
Also appearing before the committee will be the representatives of the CRTC, the country's broadcasting regulator, and Rogers Communications Inc.
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Written by Sophie Webster
