Telecom - Staff Letter addressed to Jason Ball (Rogers Communications Canada Inc. (“Rogers”))
Ottawa, 22 December 2023
Our reference: 8000-C12-202203868
By EMAIL
Jason Ball
Vice President, Legal
Rogers Communications Canada Inc. (“Rogers”)
1 Mount Pleasant, 4th Floor
Toronto ON M4Y 2Y5
Jason.Ball@rci.rogers.com
Subject: Report prepared by Xona Partners Inc. assessing the resiliency and reliability of Rogers’ wireless and wireline networks – Review by Rogers
Dear Jason Ball,
This letter is in regard to the report prepared by Xona Partners Inc. (Xona) containing its assessment of Rogers’ wireless and wireline networks for resiliency and reliability in connection with Rogers’ July 2022 outage.
In a letter to Rogers dated 22 February 2023, the Commission indicated its intent to engage an independent expert to provide a report with their assessment of the service outage and the adequacy of Rogers’ actions and planned network changes. The Commission also indicated that the report's findings would be published by the Commission to inform Canadians and stakeholders of the adequacy of the measures undertaken by Rogers to prevent a similar outage from reoccurring.
On 12 December 2023, the Commission received the attached confidential Report entitled Assessment of Rogers Networks for Resiliency and Reliability Following the 8 July 2022 Outage (“the Report”) prepared by Xona. Xona’s overall assessment is that the combination of measures that Rogers undertook after the July 2022 outage are satisfactory to improve Rogers’ network resiliency and reliability as well as to address the root cause of the July 2022 outage.
Xona noted that diligence in implementing the improved change management processes would be the most effective way to avoid a similar outage from occurring in the future. Xona also noted that enhancements to incident response processes would improve Rogers’ response and enable faster service recovery if network failure occurs. Accordingly, Xona has made several recommendations for additional measures that Rogers could undertake to further improve its network resiliency.
In light of the above, Rogers is to file with the Commission its response to the Report by 10 January 2024. The Executive Summary of the Report will be published on the Commission’s website, along with Rogers’ response to the Report.
As part of this response, Commission staff requests that Rogers address each of the seven recommendations to Rogers set out in section 3.6 of the Executive Summary, indicating whether it has implemented or will implement the recommendation and including a description of how it has been or will be implemented. If Rogers does not intend to implement a particular recommendation, a detailed explanation must be provided.
Commission staff reminds Rogers that any requests for confidentiality in respect of statements included in Rogers’ response will be assessed in light of the tremendous public interest in public disclosure.
Sincerely,
Original signed by
Leila Wright
Executive Director
Telecommunications Sector
c.c: Howard Slawner, Rogers Communications Canada Inc., Howard.Slawner@rci.rogers.com
Simon-Pierre Olivier, Rogers Communications Canada Inc.,
Simon-Pierre.Olivier@rci.rogers.com
Attach. (1):
Assessment of Rogers Networks for Resiliency and Reliability Following the 8 July 2022 Outage, Xona Partners Inc, 12 December 2023 (Confidential)
- Date modified: