By Denis Carmel
OTTAWA – On Aug. 4, the CRTC sent a letter to Pelmorex regarding the impact of Rogers’ Canada-wide service outage on its role as the operator of the National Alert Aggregation and Dissemination (NAAD) system.
“As an initial step, comprehensive information is required in order for the Commission and Canadians to understand what happened, and, just as importantly, what can be done to improve the system including how to mitigate impacts on the National Public Alerting System,” the letter reads.
The CRTC mentions that while it is considering a public inquiry on this telecommunications failure, it wishes to gather more information. Pelmorex’s response is due on Aug. 31.
It has been asked six questions about the outage:
- When and how Pelmorex was notified by Rogers (…).
- to what extent Rogers explained the impact of the outage on broadcasting-based alerting and wireless-based alerting.
- (…) a description of how the outage affected Pelmorex’s ability to operate the NAAD.
- (…) the impact of the outage on the ability of alert issuers to create alerts and last mile distributors’ (LMD) ability to receive and distribute alerts.
- how many alerts were impacted by the outage; and
- whether a capability to automatically detect if an LMD is disconnected from the NAAD could be implemented (…).
Most of these questions seem to have been answered by Rogers in its response to the CRTC on July 22.
While it seems the CRTC is gearing up to hold a public inquiry, it must consider that the House of Commons’ Industry committee appears to want to continue its examination of the issue when the House resumes on Sept. 19.
Also in the picture is the upcoming September deadline the Industry minister gave Rogers and other Canadian telecoms to provide a formal plan to address three issues: Emergency roaming, mutual assistance, and a communications protocol to ensure communications with the public and public authorities is done well.
