You don’t have to be a Rogers customer to feel the dread of waking up to the news of a widespread wireless and Internet outage on Friday morning. The day for millions of Canadians had already started badly.
At Starbucks in Toronto, there was no quick tap of a debit card to get caffeine on the go as the outage affected online payment systems across the country. Travelers in Vancouver were advised they may not be able to pay transit fees with debit cards. Cafes and libraries that still offer Wi-Fi have turned into makeshift offices. Any convenience of working from home has become an inconvenience for those who rely on the services of the telecommunications giant.
This is Rogers’ second major outage in about 14 months. The company admitted to its 11 million wireless subscribers: “We let you down today.”
Canada’s economy and everyday lives are tied to our communications networks, and when they go down, as Rogers did for most of the day Friday, there is no one-size-fits-all Plan B to keep widely used — and vital — services online.
The consequences are serious.
At least a half a million merchants use Interac debit payments, which rely on the Rogers network. Government services, including the ArriveCan app, are affected. The Niagara Health Authority had to cancel radiation therapy meetings. Some cities have warned Rogers customers that they may have trouble contacting 9-1-1 in an emergency.
“We have become extremely fragile because of the rapid pace of innovation and the rapid pace of adoption of new techniques and new forms of technology,” said economist Dan Siuriak, a senior fellow at the Center for International Governance and Innovation.
This should be a “wake-up call,” he said, not just for Rogers, but for Canada’s wireless communications infrastructure as a whole.
“We’re talking about moving to the Metaverse. We’re still in the dinosaur universe, unfortunately, and that’s pretty bad for Canada from a business perspective.”
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In an email to some enterprise customers, Rogers blamed the outage on an outage in the main network. There is no forecast for full restoration, although some services appeared to be returning to normal late Friday.
While Rogers will have to further explain what led to such a significant failure, Siurak said Canada is “behind” in the development of wireless network hardware compared to other countries, as well as in its security.
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Tyler Chamberlain, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management, is less critical of the country’s wireless communications infrastructure, noting that these types of service outages are more common in other countries.
He said it would be “really expensive” to build a system that “never fails”.
Traders at Covent Garden Market in London, Ont., told customers it was cash only on Friday due to the Rogers outage. The Interac debit payment system relies on Rogers; credit payments will also be interrupted at Rogers’ Internet-enabled businesses. (Kate Dubinsky/CBC)
Part of the problem is that whether it’s in our business or personal lives, we often rely on one company for all of our telecommunications services, Chamberlain said, which is something that companies like Rogers, Bell and Shaw are offering as an incentive for a little more. -low prices .
“[That’s] one of the things you might want to … reconsider because if you’re all in one and that goes down, you’re really isolated,” he said, especially for those who work from home full-time. However, he acknowledged that this is not necessarily an option in rural parts of the country.
Businesses that rely on wireless networks may want to consider the same, added David Soberman, professor of marketing at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
“If cashless payment systems are based on one network, you may find that some companies basically contract with two different [wireless or internet] suppliers so that they have one option if the other fails,” he said.
“But not all companies can afford all these backups.”
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Rogers customers were caught off guard by Friday’s massive outage involving both mobile and internet networks, which also caused widespread disruption to banks, businesses and some emergency services across Canada.
Who is to blame?
The onus is on a company like Rogers when its services fail, Soberman said.
“I think the real issue here is that Rogers has a problem in their systems and they’re obviously not managing it very well,” he said, noting that other major wireless and Internet providers in Canada have not had such large outages in such a short period of time of time as Rogers for the past two years.
Critics of the federal government are calling for an investigation into the Rogers service outage.
“Given the critical infrastructure that is affected, and that the CRTC itself is affected, the reason for the Rogers outage needs to be explained immediately,” Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner said in a statement released on Twittercalling for an emergency parliamentary committee meeting to “make sure it doesn’t happen again”.
leader of the NDP Jagmeet Singh claims the widespread disruption to businesses and services is the result of the Liberal government “protecting the profits of the telecom giants.”
Ciuriak said the government has a regulatory responsibility, but it stops there.
“You wouldn’t expect a government bureaucrat to understand the software requirements to ensure systems are robust and durable,” he said.
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Ben Klass says the Rogers outage is another lesson in why Canada’s telecom regulations need to be completely overhauled to ensure consumers and businesses can rely on them when they’re needed most.
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Although the CRTC has declared broadband is a basic telecommunications service, not a utility like water or electricity, which are mostly run by Crown or quasi-Crown corporations, Chamberlain added.
But Soberman said the government could consider treating wireless and Internet services similarly to ensure there is limited disruption to businesses and vital services like 911.
“[The] the internet provides an infrastructure that is as important as the electrical system, as important as water, certainly as important as the postal system,” he said.
There might be a way for other wireless or Internet companies to step in to mitigate an outage like this, he suggested.
“You might be able to create some law or regulation to ensure that service is provided to people all the time, even if one of the providers has a problem.”
The CRTC has rules regarding telecommunications networks that ensure that cell phone users can still contact 911 even without wireless service. But the regulator did not immediately respond to CBC’s question about whether that rule was violated as a result of the Rogers outage.
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“At this point, I think we can assure Canadians that this is not a cyber attack,” said Parliamentary Secretary Greg Fergus of the Canada-wide Rogers outage, citing an early analysis by the Communications Security Office.
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