Major telecommunication companies have agreed to an emergency outage deal following Roger’s July outage, the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, revealed in a statement today. 

Champagne said that in the days following the massive outage, he convened a meeting with the CEOs of Rogers and the other major wireless telecommunications companies.

He gave the companies 60 days to enter into a formal agreement to ensure and guarantee emergency roaming, mutual assistance, and a communications protocol for advising the public and government during major outages and other emergencies.

“Today, I can report to Canadians that a formal agreement has been reached by these companies, along with a number of other telecommunications service providers offering Internet and mobile services,” Champagne said. 

Starting Friday, September 9, if one of the providers face a major network outage, the other companies will provide the needed support to ensure 911 connections and business transactions aren’t affected.

The thirteen signatories include Bell Canada, Bragg Communications (Eastlink), Cogeco Communications, Rogers Communications, Shaw Communications, Freedom Mobile, Tbaytel, Telesat Canada, Telus Communications, Videotron, Xplornet Communications, Zayo Canada, and Saskatchewan Telecommunications. 

Champagne added that he is taking additional steps, including directing the Canadian Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (CSTAC) to come up with more measures over the course of six months to ensure robust and reliable telecom networks across Canada.

He called the recent Rogers outage “unacceptable” and noted that steps need to be taken to ensure something similar does not happen again.

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