Canada’s industry minister will meet with heads of Rogers Communications and other major telecommunications companies on Monday afternoon following a major outage last week that paralyzed the company’s network.
François Philippe Champagne’s office said it plans to meet with Tony Stafyeri and other telecommunications leaders to discuss the importance of improving Canada’s network.
Extensive Rogers outages began on Friday morning and lasted at least 15 hours, losing access to many healthcare, law enforcement and banking services.
According to a statement from the Champagne office, the minister felt the turmoil was “unacceptable” and explained that service was “extremely important” in the daily lives of Canadians.
Staffieri believes it was down due to a network system failure after the maintenance update, adding that the “majority” of customers have returned online.
However, some customers reported that service interruptions continued until Sunday, and Rogers issued a statement admitting that service interruptions still occur, which they described as intermittent.
In a statement, conservative industry critic Gerard Demeter explained what happened to Canadians and what steps were taken to prevent the outage from happening again. He said he should.
“Rogers and government officials need to answer these questions publicly,” Demeter said.
The NDP is calling on the Liberal Party and the CRTC to begin a formal investigation into the suspension of Rogers.
“Meeting with Rogers as a top priority by Minister Champagne shows that the Liberal Party is sticking to protecting the interests of telecommunications giants, not helping Canadians.” NDP leader Jagmeet Singh said in a statement.
“We are inviting Ministers Rogers, Interlac and Champagne to the Commission to understand what happened and to prevent this from happening again.”
Keldon Vester, a fellow at the Center for International Governance and Innovation and co-founder of Canada’s antitrust project, said the suspension on Friday highlights the need for more competition in Canada’s telecommunications. ..
“It would be a mistake to say that lack of competition caused a power outage,” Vester said. “But many elements of our telecommunications regulations and competitive systems extend the scope of alarms when they occur.”
Intensifying competition is the most important means of action in Vester’s view, but he said there are other policies that can help mitigate the effects of the outage, such as permitting emergency roaming and addressing condominium monopoly requirements. .. Emergency roaming allows customers to switch to another carrier during an outage.
A Rogers spokesperson said in a statement prior to Monday’s meeting that the company and peers in other industries would meet with Champagne “to discuss improving the resilience of Canada’s telecommunications network.”
“We are supporting an initiative to further strengthen Canada’s critical communications infrastructure.”
By Nojoud Al Mallees
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