The Rogers building in downtown Toronto.CHRIS HELGREN/Reuters
The CRTC is pushing Rogers Communications Inc. RCI-A-T to provide more information about how it was affected financially by its national outage on July 8 and what steps it is taking to ensure the reliability of its network in the future.
In a letter dated Aug. 4 but posted Tuesday to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s website, the regulator asks Rogers a second series of questions about the outage, including queries regarding its impact on emergency services and alerts, network separation and customer compensation.
The CRTC’s initial set of questions, sent in July, asked the Toronto-based telecom to explain the cause of the outage and the steps taken to mitigate the impact. Rogers responded to that request on July 22.
The July 8 outage left millions of Canadians without wireless, internet or home phone services and raised concerns about the limited number of telecommunications providers in Canada.
In its second set of questions, the CRTC has asked Rogers to provide a specific dollar amount for the financial losses it incurred as a result of the outage, as well as an explanation of its methodology in calculating that number. This information was initially requested by Don Valley North MP Han Dong during the CRTC’s appearance before the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology on July 25.
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The CRTC also asked Rogers to elaborate on how it is planning to spend the $250-million it has allotted to separate its wired and wireless services, including a detailed cost breakdown and implementation timeline. Separating the services would reduce the breadth of such an outage in the future.
In its July 22 response, Rogers said some of its customers were able to reroute emergency calls through Bell or Telus. In the follow-up questions, Rogers is being asked to explain why some of its customers were able to connect to those other wireless networks to make 911 calls while others were not.
The CRTC has also asked about the management of the company’s radio access network (RAN) and why Rogers took almost four hours to notify public safety answering points – 911 dispatch centres – that it was having service issues.
Finally, the CRTC has asked Rogers to confirm that it has compensated all of its residential and small-business customers for the outage. The telecom has said it will spend $150-million in the third quarter to reimburse customers for five days of service.
The regulator initially asked the company to respond to the second set of questions by Aug. 15 but has since extended the deadline to Aug. 22.
Rogers spokesperson Chloe Luciani-Girouard said the company will continue to work with the government to improve network resilience. “We provided the CRTC with a detailed account of the outage and the actions we are taking to ensure it does not happen again,” she said in an e-mail.
Some parts of the publicly posted letter were redacted, as they refer to confidential information submitted by Rogers as part of its response to the CRTC’s first set of questions. Some of the redacted information refers to a change that deleted a routing filter, which led to the outage.
Several consumer organizations, including the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, have requested the release of the redacted information and have asked the CRTC to launch a public consultation into the impacts of the outage.
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