By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – The CRTC has put out a contract notice Thursday for a consultancy firm that will assist in analyzing the network outage at Rogers last summer and improvements the company has committed to going forward.
The July 8 network blackout brought down critical services for millions of Canadians, including government, banking and emergency services in some cases.
This week, the regulator announced the launch of the first of a number of proceedings on telecom network resiliency, the first of which will include mandatory notification requirements on all service providers when outages like these happen. As part of the proceeding, the commission said it would be reaching out to third parties to get insight for further regulatory action.
And it wasted no time on that front. On Thursday, the commission put up the four-month contract listing for a consulting firm “who will assist in analysing and assessing Rogers’ wireless and wireline telecommunications networks for resiliency in all aspects related to the July 8, 2022 outage and evaluating the changes proposed by Rogers in response to this network outage to prevent future outages” to determine if they are sufficient and if additional measures are required to prevent such outages in the future.
Specifically, the consulting firm will have to do a “forensic level technical review” of Rogers’s network architecture, business management process and controls, change management processes and incident management processes, according to the statement of work.
Part of the job will be to “develop a deep understanding” of the network and interview “key leaders” at the company.
The committed changes from the cable giant include investing $10 billion over three years in network reliability and $250 million toward physically separating its wireless and wireline networks, the benefits and drawbacks of which the contractor is being asked to evaluate.
Bids for the CRTC contract, which would not exceed $300,000, are due on March 27.
Innovation Canada is itself searching for a contractor to evaluate what other jurisdictions do or wish to do in cases where telecommunications services are threatened by hazards.
Executives at some of the larger telecoms, including Rogers and Telus, said at a conference last year that the CRTC should restrain itself when it comes to prescriptive regulatory action in response to the former chair Ian Scott promising proceedings on network resiliency.
The large telecoms have already agreed – with the urging of the innovation minister – to support each other in cases of such major outages, including allowing customers of one company to roam on the other’s network.
