While recently there was a lot of news of one of the largest telecommunications company in Canada buying Shaw services and the legal challenges where they wouldn’t be able to keep Freedom mobile, today was sure an interesting one where the whole Rogers network appeared to have gone down nationwide. That meant no cell phone services and Internet access for millions of people.
But it didn’t end there as the scary part was how many businesses and organizations relied on their services. For example, Interac services went down as banks used the network and even government service sites were down. Not to mention airports and people who couldn’t even get into their buildings due to the connections being dead.
That first created conversations on how the country can’t be dependent on one company as the provider where in this case you can clearly see how disastrous that is should something go wrong. I was thinking too how this won’t look good for their arguments in regard to buying up other companies as an example.
The other topics that came up were kind of interesting in regards to money. So many people could access their funds because of this outage. For those who weren’t using Rogers and till had services, they were affected too such as if the recipients used their network that meant one couldn’t send and receive to them. Therefore, some people advocated on how this is why no one should ever go cashless one hundred percent.
I think this will at least raise more conversations about competition that is truly independent from say network infrastructure that the big companies lease out to the smaller ones.