The CRTC wants answers from Bell and Rogers about recently reported incidents of misrouted calls and overheard conversations of phone customers in the Niagara Region.
An August 5 letter from the CRTC to the two telecom providers is in response to incidents reported in late July by organizations such as the City of Niagara Falls, which posted on X July 25 that phone lines at its city hall were experiencing issues that, in its case, appeared to be affecting Niagara Regional Broadband Network (NRBN) enterprise voice customers making or receiving calls from Rogers numbers. Issues included one-way audio and hearing other conversations on the line, according to the city’s X post.
Also on July 25, NRBN posted on X that “The Niagara Region is experiencing a widespread telephony issue impacting calls over the Bell and Rogers voice networks impacting all providers, including NRBN. It’s been escalated with Bell and we’ll monitor the situation.” Later that day, NRBN posted that the phone issues experienced earlier were resolved.
Now the CRTC wants a detailed explanation from Bell and Rogers regarding the issue, including: the root cause; services impacted; networks affected, including technologies affected; service areas affected; timelines of when the issue was discovered and resolved; number of subscribers affected per service; numbers of calls affected, and complaints received; details of the downstream telecommunication service providers (TSPs) affected; and the number of downstream TSPs’ subscribers affected.
The commission’s request for information (RFI) for Bell and Rogers also asks for details on the actions that have been taken to resolve the issue, an expected timeline for resolving the issue, the steps taken to prevent the issue from occurring in the future, and a brief description of communication with the public on the issue.
Bell and Rogers have until August 15 to respond to the RFI. They and other interested parties will have until August 25 to comment on the RFI responses.
