Here's What Rogers Says It's Doing To 'Win Back' Canada's Trust After The Massive Outage
"To those who were impacted by our outage, I am sorry."
The CEO and President of Rogers Communications, Tony Staffieri, has laid out a plan to "win back" the trust of Canadians after the July 8 national outage.
On Monday, July 25, the telecommunications business head appeared before the parliamentary Standing Committee on Industry and Technology to discuss the outage and the company's plan to prevent similar events in the future.
The outage was nationwide and made it so many Canadians couldn't use interact services in stores or contact 911 emergency services.
In his opening remarks to the committee, Staffieri said that "we failed to deliver on our promise to be Canada’s most reliable network," before apologizing to Canadians.
"To those who were impacted by our outage, I am sorry."
The CEO then explained how exactly he and Rogers will be "working to win back the trust and confidence of Canadians."
One of the initiatives he has committed to is a roughly $250 million investment into separating the company's wireless and internet networks, to guard against another system-wide outage.
"To be frank, this added layer of protection will be expensive ... but [we] know it is the right thing to do," he said.
During the question period, Staffieri confirmed that this money will be allocated from the company's regular yearly budget.
The aim of this is to create an "always on" network to protect against widespread outages.
Rogers will always be investing $10 billion over the next 3 years to strengthen and update its network.
Along with these investments, the company has also stated it plans on collaborating with external firms to investigate the outage and see what they can learn from it.
"I know that it is only through our actions, and with time, that we can restore Canadians’ confidence in us," said Staffieri.
Since the outage, Rogers has promised all of its customers a five-day credit as part of their apology, as there were some people who were without services for multiple days.
However, Rogers users weren't the only ones affected. While Telus and Bell's networks were still up, they did warn their customers of some potential disruptions.