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How's Your Interac Doing? (July outage & telecomm stuff in general)

For the physical network, we're dealing with a natural monopoly. The cost-effective solution is for the ILECs (incumbent local exchange carriers) to build redundancy in wherever redundancy can be built in. There will almost always be some single points of failure, but by my observation those trended to fewer over the past 30 years. Where they can't be removed, backup systems are usually maintained. Getting from cold to hot standby can be a lot of work (money), but when software is involved the rule is "you can do anything in software" subject to "if you control the software" and "some things cost more than others".

For other things, the simplest solution is often to keep the old alongside the new. Touchless taps and flush in washrooms, but still with a mechanical control. Automated doors that can still be pushed/pulled. Cash/cheques and e-transfers. Rail in addition to roads and buses, not "instead of". Hardcopies and softcopies.
 
McG said:
That sounds nice but actually says nothing about how we do it.
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Some of it has been done already. Relaxing rules on patios, selling booze for curb side pickup etc etc.

Some of it is common sense, like the garden Center I mentioned that processed credit cards the old fashion way and kept their business running on what was one of the busier days of the year for them.

Businesses that refuse debit or credit are just as bad as those that refuse cash and don’t really help themselves whe; they rely on only one way of doing things.
 
Remius said:
Some of it has been done already. Relaxing rules on patios, selling booze for curb side pickup etc etc.
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Okay, you are going to have to help me understand how relaxed patio & booze rules do anything to help/strengthen Canada’s telecom network.

Remius said:
Some of it is common sense, like the garden Center I mentioned that processed credit cards the old fashion way and kept their business running on what was one of the busier days of the year for them.
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Yes, that is one solution, but it does not maintain the through-put of digital transactions. But, some credit cards no longer come with the raised numbers and the even “the old fashioned way” is not an option.

Also, going back to the old school credit card machine (as back-up) does not do anything for businesses that rely on the internet for customers to place orders. It doesn’t help the family that has been in a highway accident and cannot dial 911. It won’t help crowds at the airport when passengers suddenly cannot retrieve electronic tickets.
 
Remius said:
Some of it has been done already. Relaxing rules on patios, selling booze for curb side pickup etc etc.

Some of it is common sense, like the garden Center I mentioned that processed credit cards the old fashion way and kept their business running on what was one of the busier days of the year for them.

Businesses that refuse debit or credit are just as bad as those that refuse cash and don’t really help themselves whe; they rely on only one way of doing things.
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Keep in mind that there is a cost to the business using those services and can be quite hefty. If your customer base is mostly old people it may not make good sense to have the latest and greatest gadgets.
 
Roger's reported today that service has been restored to a majority of clients.
 
Okay, you are going to have to help me understand how relaxed patio & booze rules do anything to help/strengthen Canada’s telecom network.
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Relaxed patio/booze rules help/encourage people to congregrate, thus reducing their usage of telecommunications and associated media. The longer they relax with booze, the less capable they become of competently using any device which employs telecommunications, also reducing network strain.
 
Also, going back to the old school credit card machine (as back-up) does not do anything for businesses that rely on the internet for customers to place orders. It doesn’t help the family that has been in a highway accident and cannot dial 911. It won’t help crowds at the airport when passengers suddenly cannot retrieve electronic tickets.
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The business or airport passenger is also SOL if any of a multitude of other things happens to its network, some of which could happen right there in the building. Travelers are also SOL if they are in a non- or poorly-covered territory.

Conclusions:
Don't expect 100% reliability and plan/prepare accordingly, which may just include calmly accepting that sh!t happens.
Don't attemp to build public policy around expectations of 100% reliability.
 
McG said:
Okay, you are going to have to help me understand how relaxed patio & booze rules do anything to help/strengthen Canada’s telecom network.


Yes, that is one solution, but it does not maintain the through-put of digital transactions. But, some credit cards no longer come with the raised numbers and the even “the old fashioned way” is not an option.

Also, going back to the old school credit card machine (as back-up) does not do anything for businesses that rely on the internet for customers to place orders. It doesn’t help the family that has been in a highway accident and cannot dial 911. It won’t help crowds at the airport when passengers suddenly cannot retrieve electronic tickets.
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My point wasn’t about strengthening the telecom network. My comments were about the redundancies that local businesses should have to avoid the sort of thing that just happened.

It’s called pen and paper. They literally took down the numbers and processed the transaction once the system was up.
 
Then you are focusing on a symptom (interac & credit card access) as opposed to the problem (national network fragility).
 
McG said:
Then you are focusing on a symptom (interac & credit card access) as opposed to the problem (national network fragility).
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Sure. But it’s the same reason I have cash on hand and a generator. Redundancy in case fragile things breakdown,
 
The national network isn't that fragile. This wasn't like a hurricane or ice storm when services can be out for days. Hardly anyone even thought to notice that pandemic mitigation responses might have been expected to overtax available facilities, but didn't. That went on for months, not a few hours.
 
Good on the companies that adapted. I envision somebody dragging out the old manual credit card imprinter (the one that took you fingertip off if you weren't careful) and a stack of carbon paper invoice sets. Most places can't function if the power goes out or there is a data problem that kills the cash registers because they don't have the machine to tell them how much change to return.

A lot of businesses are moving to Internet-based payment systems, such as Square, because of the fees charged by the traditional payment systems.

It's obviously a good idea to have individual redundancy but expecting people to have redundant network systems is a bit much. Ya, it was only one network and one day, but it could have been worse, and maybe could have been deliberate. It seems a lot of businesses lost debit but at least had credit services. It will be interesting to see if there is an accounting of the cost of the outage, including retail, banking, etc. but I doubt we will see it. Maybe it should be viewed as a cautionary tale.

Maybe the government's sole role should be to engineer so kind of co-access to the backbone networks in emergent situations. Dunno - above my mental pay grade.
 
Has he stated that recently? So far I thought he'd just done his usual hero-to-the-rescue-with-other-peoples-money shtick.
 
Not sure Brad. It was an article I saw in passing when looking at this debacle. I didn't catch the date on it. Could be old. Building a fence today. No time to look today.
 
Brad Sallows said:
Has he stated that recently? So far I thought he'd just done his usual hero-to-the-rescue-with-other-peoples-money shtick.
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Nothing in the past few days re: taking the system over ...
https://twitter.com/x/status/1545486629061775360
... with a call last year for Team Red to "to enforce price caps and promote real competition instead of protecting the profits of telecoms giants"
www.ndp.ca

NDP statement on Rogers buying out Shaw communication

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh issued the following statement:
www.ndp.ca www.ndp.ca
... as part of Team Orange not wanting a Rogers-Shaw merger ...
www.ndp.ca

Stop the Merger. Lower Your Internet and Telecoms Fees.

Demand Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government stop the Rogers-Shaw merger and put people before profits.
www.ndp.ca www.ndp.ca
 
Rogers CEO: Sorry - it was maintenance stuff (The Canadian Press via CBC) ....
... In a written statement, Staffieri said the company is continuing to monitor its network for issues and investigate the root cause of the outage.

"We now believe we've narrowed the cause to a network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning," he said.

Staffieri apologized for the outage, adding that "we're particularly troubled that some customers could not reach emergency services and we are addressing the issue as an urgent priority." ...
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Nationalization would certainly be a form of monopolization, so I suppose we should credit him with being against nationalization until he says something explicitly foolish.

As for price caps, just one more piece of evidence that the NDP really are the idiot children of the political world when it comes to finances and economics. Prices are how people figure out where scarcity is; profits are what motivate them to lessen it.
 
The Bread Guy said:
Rogers CEO: Sorry - it was maintenance stuff (The Canadian Press via CBC) ....
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The fact that you do not know your own network well enough to know that this was going to be an issue is concerning. Especially when you had a trial by fire only just a year ago…

I am also especially concerned that having a back up system in place is not a legal requirement for any telecommunications company offering services to Canadians - even if that back up system only ensures access to emergency services.

(I currently have a cell phone that does not have a SIM card, and even it can call emergency services if I need it to.)

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That being said, I don’t know much about telecommunication networks or cell phone stuff. I am probably the least tech savvy person in the room and it comes to any of this.

He’s having a back up system in place and unreasonable or unreasonably expensive?

What if this had been a proper cyber attack vanity with decent cyber capabilities? Does the entire country come to a standstill for days or weeks while they try to work out the issue?

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And no, I don’t think the merger should be allowed.

One of the primary problems we have in Canada is a lack of competition when it comes to the big companies - whether it be airlines or telecommunications. The last thing we need is even less diversity and fewer options.

What happened this week is a prime example of why this is a bad idea.

0.02
 
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