The CRTC has told Rogers in a letter it plans to publish the full Xona Partners report on the cable giant’s July 2022 major service outage, after receiving letters from public interest groups requesting disclosure of the full text of the report.
On July 4, the CRTC posted an executive summary of the Xona report, which detailed the results of an independent assessment of the Rogers network architecture for reliability and resiliency, as well as the processes in place at Rogers to manage network changes and respond to network incidents like outages. Xona’s overall assessment was that the measures Rogers has undertaken after the July 2022 outage are satisfactory to address the root cause and to improve its network resiliency and reliability.
The Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC), in a July 5 letter submitted to the CRTC, said the executive summary of the report is inadequate to know if the analysis of whether Rogers’s network design, architecture and infrastructure components are currently resilient and reliable is sound, seeing as it lacks the detailed reasoning, evidence and context that must be in the full report.
PIAC is asking for the full report to be placed on the public record. The CRTC said in its letter to Rogers it also received a request from Vaxination Informatique on July 8 for the disclosure of the full text of the report.
The CRTC has now given Rogers the opportunity to review the report and highlight information that it deems confidential. Rogers has until July 17 to submit a highlighted version of the report along with any claims of confidence and justification as to why disclosure of the information would not be in the public interest, including how any specific direct harm that would likely result from the disclosure would outweigh the public interest.
“Any claims of confidence will be assessed in light of Rogers’ submission and, in accordance with its normal practices, the Commission may disclose or require the disclosure of information designated as confidential if its disclosure is in the public interest, i.e., where the specific direct harm does not outweigh the public interest in the disclosure,” the commission’s letter says.
“Given the strong public interest, Commission staff expects Rogers to accede to the disclosure of information on the public record to the maximum extent possible.”
