Canada’s industry minister is demanding immediate action from the country’s telecom companies after last week’s Rogers outage.
François-Philippe Champagne met with the heads of Rogers, Bell and Telus on Monday to discuss ways to improve the resiliency of the network across Canada.
“I told them in essence that this was unacceptable. Full stop,” Champagne said of the nationwide outage that affected millions of Canadians.
Champagne said the companies must enter into a formal arrangement within 60 days to cover three areas of concern.
They include mutual assistance during outages, emergency roaming, and a communication protocol to better inform the public and authorities during telecommunications emergencies.
Champagne said the agreement is similar to what the FCC in the United States has enacted to improve network resiliency during disasters.
“All these measures taken together will add resilience to our network and make sure we are better prepared if anything similar were to happen again,” he said.
Champagne said these initial steps will be in addition to any recommendations that come from the CRTC inquiry that will investigate the root cause of the outage.
Over the weekend, Rogers said it believes the outage was caused by a network system failure in one of its core networks following a maintenance update which caused some of its routers to malfunction.
The national outage of telecom services that millions of Canadians experienced in the last few days is unacceptable. Full stop. It affected people across the country, emergency services, small and medium size businesses and payment systems.
— François-Philippe Champagne (FPC)
(@FP_Champagne) July 11, 2022
