Includes physically separating wireless and Internet services
TORONTO — In a letter to customers published Sunday on Rogers Communications’ website, company president and CEO Tony Staffieri outlined the steps the telecom is taking “to learn from” its nationwide network outage earlier this month “and deliver the reliable network you should expect from Rogers.”
Calling it the company’s “Enhanced Reliability Plan”, Staffieri said Rogers is making changes and investments to ensure a network outage like this doesn’t happen again, as part of a personal commitment he pledged in a previous letter posted to the Rogers website shortly after the outage was over.
The company’s first step relates to emergency calls to 911. One of the more concerning aspects of the Rogers network outage that started July 8 was that Rogers wireless customers were unable to connect to 911 emergency services.
On July 11, innovation minister François-Philippe Champagne demanded Canada’s major telecoms enter into a formal agreement to address network resiliency, including putting in place emergency roaming measures and providing mutual assistance during future outages.
“We have made meaningful progress on a formal agreement between carriers to switch 911 calls to each other’s networks automatically — even in the event of an outage on any carrier’s network,” Staffieri’s letter yesterday reads.
As part of Rogers’ enhanced reliability plan, Staffieri announced is the company is “physically separating our wireless and internet services to create an ‘always on’ network — to help make sure our customers don’t experience an outage with both cellular and internet services again.”
In terms of investments, Staffieri said Rogers will invest $10 billion over the next three years in areas focused on network reliability, including “more oversight, more testing and greater use of Artificial Intelligence to ensure we’re able to deliver the reliable service [customers] deserve.”
“Finally, we are partnering with leading technology firms to do a full review of our network to help us learn from the outage. We will share lessons with our industry for the benefit of every Canadian,” Staffieri said.
Staffieri’s letter to Rogers customers comes two days after the company submitted a report to the CRTC detailing why and how its nationwide network outage occurred, and one day before Staffieri and other Rogers executives were scheduled to appear before the House of Commons standing committee on industry and technology.
