BELL CANADA’S PRESIDENT and CEO Mirko Bibic (above) posted an explanation of how Bell configures its networks on LinkedIn late Monday night.
The post followed the appearance of Rogers Communications executives at the House of Commons standing committee on industry and technology earlier in the day, during which they explained the cause of Rogers’ nationwide network outage on July 8.
“As more details emerge regarding the root cause of Rogers’ network outage, it’s important for us to outline to Canadians how Bell’s networks are configured differently,” Bibic wrote in his post.
“Bell’s wireless and wireline networks use different network infrastructures so that a major disruption on the wireline network does not take down the national wireless network. By separating our wireless and wireline networks and protecting our core from the Internet, our design enables a high level of network stability,” Bibic explained.
(Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri said yesterday during his testimony before the House of Commons committee, as well as in a letter published Sunday on Rogers’ website, that the telecom plans to physically separate its wireless and Internet networks to create an “always on” network, and thereby “set a higher standard” for network reliability.)
Bibic went on to explain in his LinkedIn post Bell’s national transport network is segmented into multiple geographic zones, which are each connected by at least three separate transport routes.
“This means that if one transport route fails, traffic is automatically routed to one of the other two routes and again to the third in the very unlikely event of a double failure,” he wrote.
“Finally, we use a highly survivable routing information exchange architecture, which separates routing control traffic away from the actual customer traffic. This design is intended to prevent Internet traffic instability from overloading our core network, and therefore avoiding a full network outage.”
Acknowledging “no network is perfect or immune from outages,” Bibic said “network architecture does make a difference.”
Bell has made continual investments in its network to keep Canadians connected, he added.
“In early 2020, we initiated a historic capital expenditure initiative in our fibre-to-the-home, 5G wireless and core networks to increase quality, coverage, capacity and resiliency, as well as ongoing expansion into rural and remote communities. By the end of this year, Bell will have invested approximately $14 billion in capital expenditures since 2020 (including planned capital expenditures of approx. $5 billion in 2022 alone),” Bibic said.
