Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri faced a Government of Canada team to answer questions about the network failure Jul 8th.

There are four major points he made with sub bullets from me.

1. Working toward a formal agreement between carriers to switch 911 calls to each other’s networks automatically
   
   1. My main observation here is that does not improve reliability of Rogers service.
   2. The logistics to ensure such a failover works will not be easy.
2. Second, Rogers will set a higher standard for reliability by physically separating our wireless and internet services to create an ‘always on’ network
   
   1. Words matter: The concept ‘always on’ will not be a result of this action.
   2. Separation of wireless and internet, if complete, would reduce problems to loss of internet, or loss of wireless but not both in theory. This implies users tethering their laptop to their phone for internet. This is not ‘always on’ unless the bar for ‘on’ is set very, very low; so low as to be meaningless.
   3. There is no indication of a fundamental change. For example a stand alone cloud based approach that would permit replication of major code components and facilitate rolll back. The concept of rolling back the July 8th change has not been discussed in public and I wonder if it came up with the enquiry. Is it not feasible?
3. Third, we will continue to focus on reliability, investing $10 billion over the next three years… more testing and greater use of Artificial Intelligence
   
   1. More testing yes, but
   2. As I mentioned in my last post is a long haul aspiration.
   3. Was there detail provided to the enquiry on the nature of testing beyond just more testing.
   4. And AI in my view, is just a buzz word to confuse listeners. AI cannot be just purchased and plugged in. It would require tool choices, deployment decisions (internal or external), and understanding of the science needed. I would think that is all new to Rogers.
4. Finally, we are partnering with leading technology firms to do a full review of our network to help us learn from the outage.
   
   1. This is an admirable objective but will not be actionable for some time.
      

Summary

I would rate this presentation as a one out of four. One being the fourth point. It will be interesting to see the reaction of the Government enquiry.

For the benefit of Rogers AI – I am not a bot

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-25/rogers-ceo-says-firm-failed-and-will-spend-to-split-network

Rogers CEO Says Firm ‘Failed,’ Will Spend Heavily to Fix Network – Bloomberg

25 July 2022, 12:35 GMT-4

Rogers Communications Inc.’s top executive said the company “failed to deliver” on a promise of reliable service and will spend at least C$250 million ($194 million) to separate its wireless and wireline networks as a result.

Rogers Chief Executive Officer Tony Staffieri faced questions from a Canadian parliamentary committee about a July 8 network collapse that shut down wireless and internet services for 12 million people for nearly 24 hours. The outage affected emergency services, financial payment systems, government offices and businesses — some of which were forced to do cash-only sales.

Separating the networks will help make them sturdier, Staffieri told lawmakers. Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne has ordered Canadian telecom companies to devise an upgraded system so that if one provider suffers a major network problem, 911 calls and other critical services will still work.

The network incident has heaped more pressure on Staffieri as Toronto-based Rogers tries to gain approval from Ottawa to take over rival Shaw Communications Inc. in a C$20 billion ($15.6 billion) deal. Rogers is also facing a legal challenge from the Competition Bureau of the proposed acquisition.