Telecom unable to answer MP’s question about economic losses
OTTAWA – Rogers Communications has provided more information to the CRTC about its recent nationwide outage, including that roughly 60% of its average daily volume of 9-1-1 calls were successfully completed by its wireless customers on July 8.
Responding to a second round of questions from the Commission on Aug. 22, Rogers explained why some 9-1-1 calls went through while others did not.
“In cases where customers were not able to successfully complete their 9-1-1 calls through the Rogers wireless networks, their devices should have attempted, as per standard industry specifications, to scan for alternative available networks,” Rogers said.
This can mean it takes longer to establish a 9-1-1 call, and as such Rogers expects “some customers would have aborted their 9-1-1 calls before the calls were being fully connected to the PSAPs.”
The company said it plans to provide more details about how to connect to alternate wireless networks during an outage on a revised 9-1-1 webpage, which will explain it can take up to one minute for the call to set up in these cases.
Rogers also noted, however, that because its RAN was still in service on July 8, it assumes many of its customers’ phones did not even attempt to connect to other networks.
While Rogers still has not disclosed much information about 9-1-1 calling during the outage, it did explain to the CRTC its “wireless networks successfully carried 9-1-1 calls in areas where either the IP core network worked intermittently, or the IP core network had been restored.”
“As a matter of fact, we know that the 9-1-1 call volume over our LTE network dropped on July 8th,” Rogers’ report explains. “However, the 9-1-1 call volume increased over our 2G and 3G network during that same period. Given that the 2G/3G networks worked intermittently too on July 8th and that we have been decreasing the voice capacity on these legacy networks, we can confirm that we were able to complete 9-1-1 calls during the outage, but not all 9-1-1 calls that were placed.”
Despite more information being filed with the CRTC, there is still a lot that is either unknown about the outage or has not been publicly disclosed.
Rogers, for example, said it is unable to answer the question from Han Dong, the member of parliament who requested the CRTC ask Rogers to quantify the direct economic losses that resulted from the outage.
“This is a tremendously complex question and Rogers simply does not possess the economic data necessary to properly model the impact of the outage,” its response to the Commission reads. “Furthermore, each customer, from the individual consumer to the largest enterprise customer, is unique and, realistically, each experienced very different impacts: from no impact to potentially very important ones. As a result, Rogers is simply not in a position to quantify the direct economic losses.”
Rogers did submit more information about its plans to separate its wireline and wireless networks and to spend $10 billion over three years to build and strengthen its network, but much of it was filed confidentially.
So, while Rogers indicated that the estimated cost to separate its networks is now $261 million (it was previously estimated to be $250 million), information about how long the full separation will take was redacted in the public version of its response to the CRTC, as was information such as the breakdown of costs associated with it and the description of its implementation timeline.
Another piece of information that did come out of Rogers’ response is it did not experience any “unusual or large-scale issues in the two weeks leading up to July 8th” despite media reports to the contrary. “The outage was not related to any past event but was solely due to an update being made in the early morning of July 8th,” Rogers said.
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