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

There is a lack of competition because telecomm is a natural monopoly. The cost of entering into a market as a proper competitor - meaning all the infrastructure and equipment - is prohibitively high. Governments are trying to create pretend competition, by allowing small entrants to pick and choose high-profit markets and pay subsidized and controlled prices for the resources and infrastructure they don't have and are unlikely to ever have. Even so, technology already got us to the point where there is meaningful competition between the big names - if this were not true, almost everyone in a region would subscribe only to plans offered by the dominant (incumbent) provider, and that's simply not true any more.

We can have one really healthy ILEC in each region they currently occupy, or a couple of competitors struggling to remain viable, and probably failing. They'd be taking more risks to control costs. We'd most likely have more failures and shittier service. Or we can hand everything over to one crown corporation and get the awesome service levels typical of a thoroughly non-competitive environment in which the employees draw their pay no matter how customers feel.

It's ironic that the corporate boogeymen most people like to hate are the ones responsible for the really vital things - energy, communications.
 
How did SaskTel hold up through Rogers outage?
 
The operations of other telcos can probably be assessed by the number of articles about them on CBC. So far "none".
 
Brad Sallows said:
There is a lack of competition because telecomm is a natural monopoly. The cost of entering into a market as a proper competitor - meaning all the infrastructure and equipment - is prohibitively high. Governments are trying to create pretend competition, by allowing small entrants to pick and choose high-profit markets and pay subsidized and controlled prices for the resources and infrastructure they don't have and are unlikely to ever have. Even so, technology already got us to the point where there is meaningful competition between the big names - if this were not true, almost everyone in a region would subscribe only to plans offered by the dominant (incumbent) provider, and that's simply not true any more.

We can have one really healthy ILEC in each region they currently occupy, or a couple of competitors struggling to remain viable, and probably failing. They'd be taking more risks to control costs. We'd most likely have more failures and shittier service. Or we can hand everything over to one crown corporation and get the awesome service levels typical of a thoroughly non-competitive environment in which the employees draw their pay no matter how customers feel.

It's ironic that the corporate boogeymen most people like to hate are the ones responsible for the really vital things - energy, communications.
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At least with energy (electrical anyway), there are enforceable standards by way of the Canadian Electrical Code and industry-imposed standards by way of the various Electrical Reliability Coordinating Councils that utilities must meet to be connected to a synchronous grid.

One of the ways telecoms get away with minimal government intervention is that their service is largely not safety related; no dangerous substances, voltages, etc. The government needs to consider 'safety' in a broader sense.
SeaKingTacco said:
Can you imagine SSC running all telecommunications in Canada?
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They would have an entire department trying to convince us that 10mbs and service between 0815 and 1630 is good.
 
Even if governments didn't set standards for things like grids, companies would do it among themselves. No compulsion needed; just business self-interest.

No point getting too worked up about one-time events. A review will most likely reveal one or more of the following happened:
  • someone didn't know a process
  • someone didn't follow a process
  • process was deficient

Who knows; maybe something was changed to cut costs because the Canadian government has been playing games with spectrum auctions. For the want of a nail the shoe was lost... (Note for the hard of thinking: I'm being sarcastic, notwithstanding the fact that money is completely fungible.)
 
🍿

Minister Champagne to hold a media availability to discuss the importance of improving the reliability of networks across Canada - Canada.ca

The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, will hold a media availability by teleconference to provide an update on his meeting with the CEOs of Rogers and other major telecommunications service providers to discuss the importance of improving the...
www.canada.ca www.canada.ca
1630 Eastern - let's see what comes out of this, shall we?
 
The Bread Guy said:
🍿

Minister Champagne to hold a media availability to discuss the importance of improving the reliability of networks across Canada - Canada.ca

The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, will hold a media availability by teleconference to provide an update on his meeting with the CEOs of Rogers and other major telecommunications service providers to discuss the importance of improving the...
www.canada.ca www.canada.ca
1630 Eastern - let's see what comes out of this, shall we?
Click to expand...
Hey its not Friday afternoon.....
 
From CBC: (https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-demanding-improve-network-rogers-outage-1.6516970)

"Canada's industry minister says he is calling on Rogers and other telecommunication companies to come up with a plan to bolster the resiliency of Canada's cellular and internet networks after Friday's massive outage left millions offline and affected some critical services."

There's a well of ambitions with no bottom. Someone prod him to call on the federal and provincial governments to come up with a plan to bolster the resiliency of Canada's health care system.

"NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said his party would support a parliamentary investigation. He went further than his Conservative counterparts by calling on the government to enact new regulations and break up large telecommunication companies like Rogers to promote more competition."

Brilliant. How could we not see this. More regulations will solve anything as long as you write enough of them. If the problem is not solved, it can only be because not enough regulations have been written.

Obviously breaking up large companies into smaller ones will make it harder to come up with the capital for really big projects, not to mention promote a patchwork of quality. I've stepped into a few operations centres of utilities in my time; after a while you can predict what to expect based on the "richness" of the political jurisdiction. They are not all equal. Atlantic Canada would end up with a level of service its customers could afford, which I doubt would equal what customers of a GTA-only company could afford.
 
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The Bread Guy said:
🍿

Minister Champagne to hold a media availability to discuss the importance of improving the reliability of networks across Canada - Canada.ca

The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, will hold a media availability by teleconference to provide an update on his meeting with the CEOs of Rogers and other major telecommunications service providers to discuss the importance of improving the...
www.canada.ca www.canada.ca
1630 Eastern - let's see what comes out of this, shall we?
Click to expand...

Empty snack trays.... that's what will come out of this ;)

Nothing like a simpering and posturing politician, with absolutely no power over your business and no interest in investing some real money in the problem, to stoke the appetite of a gigantic ISP firm ;)
 
Brad Sallows said:
Even if governments didn't set standards for things like grids, companies would do it among themselves. No compulsion needed; just business self-interest.

No point getting too worked up about one-time events. A review will most likely reveal one or more of the following happened:
  • someone didn't know a process
  • someone didn't follow a process
  • process was deficient

Who knows; maybe something was changed to cut costs because the Canadian government has been playing games with spectrum auctions. For the want of a nail the shoe was lost... (Note for the hard of thinking: I'm being sarcastic, notwithstanding the fact that money is completely fungible.)
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I agree that some people seem to be having the vapours over this, but there is precedence. Rogers also had a nation-wide outage in April 2021, apparently caused by a software update, although it seems it did not cross all their platforms and services. When your network goes down and your response is impaired because you can't contact your make-it-right people because your network is down, don't strike me as robust disaster planning.

I'm not familiar at all with the legislative/regulatory framework that governs telecommunications in Canada. Without some manner of reliability standards, business self-interest will always balance cost and benefit. When the industry has heavily marketed fingertip connectivity 'any time , any where', and consumers, businesses and even governments have bought into it, I'm not sure there is much beyond their own bottom line to measure that against. It's not like their outage dragged down other networks.

I was very (very) peripherally involved in the roll-out of my former police service's radio system (now being replaced) which is on the backbone of Bell Mobility (Bell Mobility Radio). Early on, it was learned that the service delivery standards were written unclearly, in BMR's favour. Responding to a dead tower on a Sunday would be assessed on commercial, not public safety, standards that sometimes resulted in them not responding responding until Monday.
 
Brad Sallows said:
Even if governments didn't set standards for things like grids, companies would do it among themselves. No compulsion needed; just business self-interest.

No point getting too worked up about one-time events. A review will most likely reveal one or more of the following happened:
  • someone didn't know a process
  • someone didn't follow a process
  • process was deficient

Who knows; maybe something was changed to cut costs because the Canadian government has been playing games with spectrum auctions. For the want of a nail the shoe was lost... (Note for the hard of thinking: I'm being sarcastic, notwithstanding the fact that money is completely fungible.)
Click to expand...
And companies did do exactly that. 'Bell System Practices' were the telephone service standard for all of North American for two generations. In the 1940s and'50s there were over 1,500 privately owned telephone companies in Ontario - almost every community had its own little phone company.In the 1930s, when the demand for 'long distance' calling grew there had to be standards se by the companies that connected the small, local telcos tp each other. The costs of meeting increasingly stringent network standards - and a desire for a quick profit - drove many local phone company owners (often the children and grandchildren of the original owners (often the local doctors)) to see our because 'Ma Bell' offered top dollar.

Innovation Science and Economic Development Canada - François-Philippe Champagne is the Minister - has a compete sector called Spectrum and Telecommunication (https://ic.gc.ca/eic/site/icgc.nsf/eng/h_00019.html#spectrum…) headed by Éric Dagenais (https://iicom.org/profile/eric-dagenais/…) as Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, and part of its mandate is: "Engineering, Planning and Standards Branch: Develops technical standards, regulations and spectrum band plans; authorizes spectrum for satellite services; advances Canada's spectrum interests and objectives in international fora; regulates telecommunications terminal and wireless equipment; and works to improve the security of the national telecommunications and information infrastructure against cyberattack." I still recognize a few names here - including some really, really switched on engineers who are now directors and DGs. It is not unreasonable to expect that they will look closely at the national network and at Canada's responsibilities in the continental and global system.
 
In this case, the business self-interest is reputation and keeping "churn" down. They are all strongly motivated to be reliable, irrespective of what governments do (which is mostly pose for votes).
 
Headline and a subhead at CBC.ca:

"CRTC ordering Rogers to explain in detail what caused massive network outage"

"Experts say tighter regulations 'foundational to the very operation of society'"

Presumably this means no one outside Rogers knows exactly what happened yet, which means none of them could possibly have done an analysis/estimate to determine what corrective courses are open and/or should be taken.
 
Brad Sallows said:
Presumably this means no one outside Rogers knows exactly what happened yet, which means none of them could possibly have done an analysis/estimate to determine what corrective courses are open and/or should be taken.
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Telecommunications regulation/monitoring has always been a bit of a hot mess.

We have many organizations and sub sections of organizations that have a horse in the race, but no one overarching that provides a firm hand when things go sideways.

Telecommunications have been seen as a private enterprise vice a national resource for decades, but the Roger's shortage demonstrates the truly national impact these enterprises have in seeing our society function day to day.

My money is on worker incompetence and/or lack of system redundancy, because, that's probably the most plausible reason for the outage. I doubt it was a DDoS attack, but this sure as hell has highlighted a few chinks in the Armour to our enemies.
 
Telecommunications regulation/monitoring has always been a bit of a hot mess.
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It's more than that. Big Telecomm, like Big Oil, is something politicians can reliably beat up on to the satisfaction of voters and distract attention from their (politicians') own failings. Since pandemic concerns abated more attention has fixed on long delays for urgent health care; it's a large problem; it's expensive; and it's entirely in governments' laps (hard to blame doctors and nurses etc for the shortcomings). Along comes the Rogers outage: "Squirrel!"
 
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