As Canada’s major telecommunications companies are now tasked with developing a contingency plan to mitigate the impact of future outages and other emergency scenarios, a former telecommunications executive says there is a risk of creating a situation where a competitor’s network is overwhelmed and service is ultimately degraded.
Former Telus chief financial officer Robert McFarlane said while devising a strategy to ensure everyone’s phones can work on other networks in the event of a service outage makes “tremendous sense”, the telecommunications providers will need to be very thoughtful in their approach.
He says an additional challenge will be determining whether or not a provider should favor its own customers over those who use that provider as a backup during an emergency.
Federal Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne met with Rogers chief executive Tony Staffieri and the heads of several other telecom providers on Monday afternoon and ordered the companies to come up with a crisis plan.
This includes emergency roaming agreements, a “mutual assistance” framework during outages, and a communications protocol to “better inform the public and authorities during telecommunications emergencies.”
The meeting was called in response to last week’s widespread Rogers service outage that lasted at least 15 hours, and in some cases even days, preventing access to healthcare, law enforcement and banking services for many Canadians.