Eastlink says claims are ‘inaccurate’
By Ahmad Hathout
OTTAWA – Third-party competitors using Eastlink’s network are asking the CRTC to find the cable company guilty of negligence when a network outage this summer that affected tens of thousands of Canadians allegedly caused “significant economic and reputational harm” to them.
Competitors City Wide, Frontier Networks, and Purple Cow Internet allege in the Part 1 application dated November 9 that Eastlink disconnected their customers’ service for 24 hours starting July 3 due to an error caused by a new software update to the company’s billing system that they said incorrectly flagged all of the cableco’s third-party internet access customers as not having paid their access bills. The outage allegedly affected IPTV, emergency calls over voice-over-internet protocol services, security and medical alert services.
The competitors say the damage largely affected Atlantic Canada, and they do not believe Eastlink’s own retail customers were affected.
The application is asking the CRTC to initiate a proceeding to investigate the outage and force Eastlink to compensate them for the damage caused, including millions of dollars in administrative monetary penalties.
The application also asks the CRTC to force Eastlink to remove a provision in its third-party access agreement (TPIA) that prohibits competitors from mentioning Eastlink in communications with the public, citing violations of the Charter.
The carriers allege Eastlink has failed to comply with the CRTC’s network outage notification and reporting rules by not providing a network outage report required by the new interim reporting regime.
They also allege Eastlink structured its billing systems in a way that violates the disconnection provisions of its access tariff, and refused to assist the competitors by providing public statements explaining that it was solely responsible for the outages.
The application asks the CRTC to further call for Eastlink to divulge information related to the causes of the outage, its response to it, the compensation Eastlink provided, and measures the cableco has taken or will take to prevent a similar outage – a la information Rogers was asked to provide when its network went out last summer.
The application alleges that when the competitors filed support tickets to Eastlink, the TPIA support department was dismissive of the initial reports and told them that they needed to pay for service to be reconnected.
“Despite making numerous phone calls to various support numbers and Eastlink staff members, the Competitors were generally unable to make any meaningful contact with anyone at Eastlink for several hours,” the application says. “It was not until late afternoon Atlantic Time on 3 July 2023, after City Wide called the President of Eastlink on his mobile number, that Eastlink began to acknowledge a serious error had occurred on its end and that it was working on fixing the issue.”
“Eastlink chose to deny, deflect and / or ignore the Competitors’ reports rather than take decisive action to mitigate the damages caused by the Outage. The resulting disconnections are clearly and inexcusably the result of Eastlink’s negligence,” the application continued.
This acknowledgement, however, did not stop the disconnections, the application alleges, adding the competitors believe Eastlink was understaffed on the Monday for a substitute holiday because Canada Day fell on a Saturday this year.
“It is inexplicable and negligent that Eastlink chose a holiday to allow untested changes to its billing system to perform a massive and automatic disconnection of tens of thousands of end-users,” the application said.
The competitors claim they were current on payments when the outage happened. They added, though, that even if they weren’t, “the method by which Eastlink proceeding to disconnect their services was illegal as it contravened the disconnection provisions of Eastlink’s TPIA Tariff.”
Those Eastlink provisions allegedly include that the network provider disclose the reason for termination and amount owing; that at least 30 days be given before disconnection; and that a deferred payment agreement can be entered into before such a disconnection is made.
The bulk of the 227-page report consists of exhibits of customer complaints on Facebook and company reviews, meant to show the alleged reputational harm they suffered.
An Eastlink spokesperson told Cartt in a statement: “We look forward to setting the record straight through our response to the inaccurate claims in this filing.”
