What happened at Rogers? Day-long outage is over, but questions remain

A day after a software error wiped out wireless services for thousands of Rogers customers across Canada, consumers, telecom executives and critical public services still have questions as to what exactly happenedand how it can be avoided in the future.

Wireless service was offlinefor much of Monday for thousands of Rogers customers, along with theirFido and Chatrbrands. Most impacted customers seemed to be clustered around Toronto and Montreal, but there were reports from across the country,startingearlyMonday morning, and the network only cameback online fully after 8 p.m. eastern time.

On Tuesday, the company extendedan olive branch to affected customers, offering "a credit equivalent to yesterday's wireless service fee," or whatever one day of service would cost on their monthly plan roughly $2 on a $60 monthly plan, for example.

"Weoffer our sincere apologies and will work hard to earn back your trust," the company said.

Toronto resident and communications specialist Rachael Collier, a Fido customer, said she first noticed her phone wasn't working Monday morning when she tried to make a doctor's appointment.

"I thought my call wasn't going through because so many people are trying to get vaccines today," she told the Canadian Press.

"Then I realized I couldn't make any calls," Collier said. "They're saying it's intermittent, but my phone hasn't worked all day. It's clearly an absolutely massive outage."

Milton, Ont., resident Deep Mehta said he hadn't had service for more than 12 hours.

"It's frustrating because I'm trying to operate a business from home and that's the number that everyone has," he said. "I just had to take my son to the orthodontist and I couldn't check in on my phone."

WATCH | Rogers networks hit by widespread outages across country:

Rogers networks hit by widespread outages

3 years ago

Duration 1:16

Rogerss wireless and data networks were hit by widespread outages for most of Monday, not only impacting people working from home but critical health-care communication and some 911 services.

Emergency services impacted

Emergency services across the country were impacted, but Rogers notes that outgoing 911 calls were never inaccessible for customers.

Ottawa-based independent telecom consultantRussell McOrmondsaid losing such services illustrates the seriousness of the outage.

"This was not some minor inconvenience," he said in an interview. "Alot of municipalities had to send out messages telling people to keep trying."

McOrmond says he is especially concerned that the outage impacted Canada's vaccination plans for COVID-19, as many people couldn't book or find out about appointments.

"Due to the Rogers outage yesterday, some vaccine clinics were forced to use paper-based reporting," a spokesperson for Ontario's Ministry of Health told CBC News in a statement Tuesday.

"It wasso much bigger than anyone realizes," McOrmond said.

Public vs. private

A software developer for more than 30 years, McOrmond has testified at numerous CRTC hearings about wireless policy, and he says the outage underlines a fundamental problem of the industry that instead of being treated like a utility, telecommunications networks have been handed over to private companies, whichown every part of the infrastructure.

He isn't arguingthat the solution isa government-run cellphone company, but rather that the infrastructure should be deemed a utility run by municipalities, and then companies would compete to offer services on it.

"Whenthe private sector provides all the layers we see the sort of silly failures we see in Canada," he said.

Rogers blamed the outage on a software update from Ericsson, one of its network equipment providers.

While anything can break, McOrmond argues that allowing companies to own and operate all parts of their vertically integrated telecom networks makes those problems cascadewhen they happen.

"Contrary to what the'government is bad' ideologues say,with basicutilities like water and power,yes we have an outage every once in a while, but we have far less outages than the private sector services we get."

Competition would 'create robust networks'

Telecom executive Anthony Lacavera founded Wind Mobile more than a decade ago, and while he currently has no active role in Canada's telecom sector, he is a firm believer that competition not more government involvement is the way to fix any problems.

"Having independentcompetitorswould ensure that the right investments are being made to create robust networks," he said in an interview Tuesday.

"I understand that public utility argument, but Ithink it underestimates the cost of building the networks we need," he said.

Lacaveraviews Monday's outage as a wake up call about how important these networks are, not only in the current world where more people are working online and remotely because of COVID-19, but also because of the 5G future that will be even more dependent on connectivity.

"It's one thingto lose your ability to tweetor go on Facebookbut quite another when an autonomous vehicle losesconnection," he said. "Imagine an outage in the next generation, with remote surgeries.

"Yesterday it became clear to Canadians how important wireless networks are."

Roaming arrangements

Lacaveraacknowledges that every technology is capable of breaking down, and he says Monday's outage is a lesson in where it needs to improve.

"If I wanted toputmy engineering hat on, Iwouldsay what is the most survivable network?"

The answer, he says, is one where phones that are down on one network can be transferred seamlessly over to another network while the outage is repaired. If this sort of roaming arrangement had beenin place Monday, thenaccording to Lacavera, "the traffic could have moved."

There's no clear answeras to why that didn't happen, which is why McOrmondis in favour of turning Canada's wireless airwaves into something more like a public utility.

"There's things that should be utilities, and things that should be private sector," he said, and finding out which is which should be paramount because "the way we do our telecommunications is costing us."