The CRTC has asked Bell Canada for additional information regarding the factors that may have contributed to a 911 network outage that affected all of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island on Jan. 31, 2023, which Bell subsequently reported in its annual 911 outage report for that year.
The issue reportedly occurred due to network changes with respect to implementation of 10-digit dialling required to support the 988 service on the Atlantic 911 tandems. Both the primary and secondary Atlantic 911 tandems were rendered unable to process 911 calls originating in the Maritimes, resulting in 911 callers in the region receiving a fast busy signal and a significant number of calls not being delivered to the public safety answering points (PSAPs), according to a recap of the issue in a CRTC letter dated Nov. 29 and addressed to Philippe Gauvin, assistant general counsel at Bell.
In addition to asking Bell for more details about the factors that led to the January 2023 outage, the CRTC wants additional information on the steps Bell has taken or will take to prevent similar outages from reoccurring.
Some of the particular information the CRTC requests Bell to provide by Jan. 8, 2025 includes what the specific length of time was from the detection of the issue to implementation of the solution, and what the solution was and how it fixed the issue. In addition, the commission asks Bell to describe the procedure it took in the implementation of 10-digit dialling, including whether any special considerations were applied for 911 tandems and if Bell directly approved of the process chosen for the 10-digit dialling implementation.
The commission also wants to know if a risk assessment was performed prior to implementing the 10-digit dialling (and if so, what it concluded), as well as whether or not a post incidence review was conducted by Bell (and if so, the commission wants Bell to provide the review and its results).
Other questions the CRTC wants Bell to answer include whether it was possible to implement the network changes in a manner that would not simultaneously impact both 911 tandems serving the Maritimes (and if so, why this procedure wasn’t used), as well as why the mitigation efforts implemented by Bell in response to the 911 network outage were not in place prior to the incident.
In terms of Bell’s remediation response to the outage, the commission asks what new mechanisms were implemented by Bell to enable earlier detection of 911 call failures and what improvements Bell made to processes triggering human intervention and the activation of post-event mitigations.
