Rogers Communications on Sunday announced steps it says will make sure what happened during a nationwide service outage on July 8 doesn’t happen again.
In a letter to customers, CEO Tony Staffieri outlined the company’s “enhanced reliability plan.”
On 911 calls — which were disrupted in many parts of the country during the outage — he said Roger is working on a formal agreement with competitors “to switch 911 calls to each other’s networks automatically — even in the event of an outage on any carrier’s network.”
On the wireless and internet front, he pledged that the company will “physically” separate those services to create an “always on” network so customer won’t experiences outages for both at the same time — something that happened to many on July 8.
Staffieri also said the company will invest $10 billion over the next three years on such things as oversight, testing and artificial intelligence.
“I know that it is only through these actions that we can begin to restore your confidence in Rogers and earn back your trust,” Staffieri said.
Monday, July 11 – The Canadian economy, and everyday life, is tethered to our communications networks, and when they go down, like Rogers did for much of the day Friday, there is no universal Plan B to keep widely-used – and vital — services online.We’ll talk about the need for a backup plan.
The letter to customers comes two days after Rogers sent a letter to Canada’s broadcasting regulator detailing the cause and immediate aftermath of the service outage — which started early on July 8 and for some customers lingered for days — that left millions of Canadians without cellphone and internet service.
Rogers told the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) that coding from an update to its network deleted a routing filter that “allowed for all possible routes to the internet to pass through the routers,” which flooded and overwhelmed the core network, causing it to stop processing internet traffic altogether.
The letter met a deadline by the CRTC for Rogers to answer questions about the outage, but it has many redactions where Rogers is believed to have offered more specific details.
On Monday, officials from Rogers and a slew of 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 they are taking to make sure it won’t happen again.