OTTAWA – After meeting with representatives from several Canadian telecommunications service providers, Innovation, Science and Industry minister François-Philippe Champagne announced he has directed them to take immediate steps to address network resiliency in Canada.
The meeting, attended by representatives from Rogers, Telus, Bell, Videotron, Shaw, SaskTel and Eastlink, comes as Rogers continues to work to restore its networks, which are close but not quite fully operational, following a nationwide outage that began early Friday morning.
“I’ve demanded that they take immediate initial steps to improve the resiliency of our networks,” Champagne told reporters during a conference call this afternoon following the meeting.
“This will be in addition to the CRTC inquiry to investigate the root cause of the failure and make additional recommendations about what we can do to improve the network resiliency in Canada,” he said.
Champagne expects within 60 days from today Canadian telecoms will enter into a formal agreement similar to the Mandatory Disaster Response Initiative adopted in the U.S.
The Canadian agreement will cover three things: mutual assistance during any future outages, emergency roaming, and communication protocols to ensure the public and authorities are well informed during times of crisis.
“All these measures taken together will add resilience to our network and make sure we are better prepared if anything similar would ever happen in Canada,” the minister said.
These are just the first steps the government is taking to address network resiliency. Champagne indicated further steps will be taken once there is a better understanding of what happened on Friday.
In addition to the CRTC inquiry into the Rogers outage, Champagne said the Canadian Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee has been asked to come up with best practices to share. From there, the government will look at additional measures that can be taken to add more resiliency to Canadian networks.
Update: Since the minister made this announcement some have questioned whether what he is asking for is technically feasible, particularly for wireline services. Because of this, and because the U.S. initiative Champagne talked about is specifically for wireless operators, not wireline, Cartt.ca asked Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada to clarify whether both wireline and wireless services were expected to be covered in the agreement Champagne wants. A spokesperson with the department said, “To the extent possible, these agreements will apply to both wireless and wireline services.”
