The IT Nerd

I’ll put the news out there first before I tell you what I think of it. Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri has put out another statement that speaks to their intentions to make their network better. Here’s what you need to know:

First, emergency calls to 911 simply have to work. Every time. We have made meaningful progress on a formal agreement between carriers to switch 911 calls to each other’s networks automatically – even in the event of an outage on any carrier’s network. I believe this is the only responsible way forward and I am personally committed to making it possible for all Canadians.

That’s a good first step seeing that Rogers failed miserably in that department. There’s also the fact that telcos like Rogers are legally required to have 911 calls work 100% of the time without fail.

Second, Rogers will set a higher standard for reliability by physically separating our wireless and internet services to create an ‘always on’ network – to help make sure our customers don’t experience an outage with both cellular and internet services again.

I will admit that splitting the networks will help to keep Canadians online if something like this happens again. Though the cynic in me says that if there’s a way for Rogers to have both networks fail, they will find it and it will happen.

Third, we will continue to focus on reliability, investing $10 billion over the next three years. This includes more oversight, more testing and greater use of Artificial Intelligence to ensure we’re able to deliver the reliable service you deserve.

That implies to me that they weren’t spending either enough money or any money in any of those areas. So I guess you can call this an improvement. But you have to ask yourself why haven’t they done any or all of this prior to the network crashing down around them a couple of weeks ago.

Finally, we are partnering with leading technology firms to do a full review of our network to help us learn from the outage. We will share lessons with our industry for the benefit of every Canadian.

Alternate plan: How about sharing those lessons with every Canadian so that Rogers can be held accountable for addressing their shortcomings? Right. I keep forgetting. That’s not going to happen. Rogers isn’t that sort of company to be completely transparent as proven by their CRTC filing.

Frankly, I am not impressed.

What I read from this is that Rogers is in full panic mode as I am guessing that businesses and individuals such as myself are rapidly fleeing to other telcos such as Bell and Telus. Thus they have to say something to keep their churn rates from skyrocketing massively, which in turn would cause their stock value to drop. Not to mention that they really need to do something to keep their attempt to merge with Shaw Communications from becoming a train wreck next to a dumpster fire. What I also read from this is that Rogers was likely underfunding their network, which is something that always comes back to bite you. I’ll give Staffieri points for coming out with statements like these, but I don’t think it’s going to be enough to save Rogers.

This entry was posted on July 24, 2022 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Rogers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.