Minister orders telcos to reach an agreement to help each other during blackouts

Canada’s industry minister has directed the country’s major telecommunications companies to reach agreements on emergency roaming, helping each other during outages, and a communication protocol to better inform Canadians during emergencies.

François-Philippe Champagne also said that Canada’s broadcast regulator, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, will investigate the recent mass outage of Rogers Communications.

Champagne made the announcement Monday after a meeting with executives from major telecommunications companies. The goal of the meeting was “to demand that you take immediate action to improve the resiliency and reliability of our networks,” she said.

“The nationwide disruption to telecommunications services that millions of Canadians have experienced in recent days is unacceptable. Final point. It affected people across the country, emergency services, small and medium businesses, and payment systems,” he said on Twitter.

“Canadians deserve more from their providers in terms of quality and reliability of service and I will ensure they meet the high standard Canadians have come to expect, including improved competition, innovation and affordability.”

The minister said agreements between telcos on emergency roaming and other policies must be in place within 60 days. Emergency roaming would give customers the ability to switch to another carrier during an outage.

“This is very similar to what the Federal Communications Commission did in the United States,” Champagne said in a teleconference with reporters on Monday.

The industry minister said that this formal agreement between the Canadian telecommunications companies is only the first step.

However, Champagne did not clarify whether the interruption will lead to new policies to promote competition in the telecoms industry.

Keldon Bester, a fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation and co-founder of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, said the outage highlights the need for more competition in Canadian telecommunications.

“It would be incorrect to say that lack of competition caused the blackout,” Bester said. “But a number of elements of our telecommunications regulation, as well as the competition system, increase the scope of the alarm when it occurs.”

Although increasing competition is the most critical course of action in Bester’s view, he said there are other policies that can help mitigate the impact of disruptions, such as allowing emergency roaming and addressing condo exclusivity requirements.

A Rogers spokesman said in a statement before Monday’s meeting that the company and other industry peers will meet with Champagne “to discuss increasing the resilience of Canada’s telecommunications network.”

“We support initiatives that further strengthen Canada’s critical telecommunications infrastructure.”

Champagne said there was unanimous agreement among all the companies on Monday that a change is needed.

“Everyone recognized that this was unacceptable, that we need to work together to improve reliability and quality, and certainly that there was a willingness to learn from each other,” he said.

Rogers’ widespread outage began Friday morning and lasted at least 15 hours, cutting off access to many healthcare, law enforcement and banking services.

Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri attributed the outage to a network system failure after a maintenance update, adding that the “vast majority” of customers were back online.

But some customers reported service outages that stretched into Sunday, and Rogers issued a statement acknowledging that some were still experiencing service outages that it described as intermittent.

In a statement, conservative industry critic Gérard Deltell said Canadians should be given an explanation about what happened and what steps are being taken to ensure the outage doesn’t happen again.

“Rogers and government officials need to publicly answer these questions,” Deltell said.

The NDP had asked the Liberals and the CRTC to launch a formal investigation into the Rogers blackout.

“Minister Champagne’s meeting with Rogers as a top priority shows that the Liberals are obsessed with protecting the profits of the telecom giants rather than helping Canadians,” NDP leader Jagmeet Singh said in a statement before the meeting. Minister’s announcement.

“We will be looking to bring Rogers, Interac and Minister Champagne into committee to find out what happened and make sure this never happens again.”

This report from The Canadian Press was first published on July 11, 2022.


Leave a Comment