OTTAWA – Earlier this month, the CRTC asked Rogers for more information about its July nationwide outage, according to a letter posted on the CRTC’s website last night.
The letter, sent to Rogers on Aug. 5, asks the telecom to submit answers to a second series of questions about the outage. The request was made after Rogers filed a report on July 22 responding to a list of initial questions from the CRTC.
In the second list of questions, which is partially redacted as it refers to some information Rogers filed in confidence, the CRTC asks Rogers to “quantify the direct economic losses of the outage,” and “provide the methodology to calculate the impact as well as any assumptions.” This information was previously requested by Han Dong when the CRTC appeared before the House of Commons industry and technology standing committee.
The CRTC is also asking for detailed information about Rogers’ plans to physically separate its wireless and wireline networks, including a cost breakdown, details about the timeline for implementation and an explanation of how its plan will improve network resiliency.
Rogers is further to provide the Commission with information on why some its customers were able to call 911 after connecting to either Bell or Telus’ networks but others were not and why some 911 calls made by customers on its own wireless network were successful despite the failure of the IP core.
The complete set of second questions from the CRTC is available here.
Rogers was supposed to respond by Aug. 15 but asked for an extension until Aug. 22.
Rogers requested the extra week because since the outage, many of the company’s employees have been spending evening and weekends working to restore service and stabilize its networks. “Only now have many of these essential employees been able to take some needed time off,” an Aug. 8 letter from Rogers to the Commission says.
Additionally, Rogers notes it needed to respond to several requests for disclosure submitted in relation to its July 22 report to the Commission by last Friday. Public Interest Advocacy Centre, the Competitive Network Operators of Canada, Canada Deaf Grassroots Movement and the Deaf and Hard of Hearing Coalition are among those that have asked the CRTC for more information to be made public from Rogers’ initial report.
The CRTC has also asked Pelmorex to answer questions about the impact of the Rogers outage on its role as operator of the National Alert Aggregation and Dissemination system and is still considering holding a public inquiry into the outage.
All documents the CRTC has published related to the nationwide outage so far can be found here.
