Some are questioning the concentration of services in the telecom sector.
There is a person walking past a building.
The photo was taken by Carlos Osorio.
Rogers Communications Inc.'s chief executive Tony Staffieri is scheduled to meet with Canada's industry minister on Monday in the wake of a massive internet and cell phone network failure.
The nationwide disruption, which the minister's office called "unacceptable," has led some to question the level of concentration of services in the telecom sector.
The impact on Rogers will be a $65-million to $75-million cost to credit customers, and a likely loss of some customers who are frustrated by the second such outage in the past 18 months.
Increased political and regulatory risk is a possibility beyond the immediate financial impact, according to the analyst.
In March, Franois-Philippe Champagne, the Industry Minister, said that the wholesale transfer of wireless assets to Rogers was not compatible with the government's objectives to increase mobile.
Increased political and regulatory risk is a possibility
Maher Yaghi
Richard Leblanc is a professor of governance, law and ethics at York University.
He said that meetings should take place in public and under oath. Threat actors have seen how a telecom outage can affect health care and emergency response.
Leblanc proposed that the telecoms should be restricted in the way they bundle their services in the wake of the outage.
Regulatory oversight needs to balance the risk of future failures against the increased costs of building parallel networks, according to Yaghi.
The industry minister is Franois-Philippe Champagne.
The Canadian Press took a photo.
He told clients that the history of other failures in other parts of the world shows that regulators have chosen to increase oversight.
Rogers and Shaw have agreed to sell Shaw's Freedom mobile assets to Quebecor to alleviate competition concerns, with the analyst maintaining an 80% probability on the merger going through.
The internet was brought down for many hours by a system failure at Amazon that was blamed on human error.
He said that Amazon was able to identify the cause of the issue and put in place improvements to reduce the risk of future failures. The market share leader in cloud services is Amazon Web Services, also known asAWS.
The Rogers outage exposed flaws in crisis management and came at a bad time for the company, which is still trying to recover from family squabbles that led to a board change and court challenge over control last year.
The first communication about the network failure was four hours later.
Even though it was not a cyberattack by a foreign threat actor, customers would be helped if they knew the root cause.
The path to recovery involves serious attention to corporate governance, crisis management, and robust and independently audited internal controls.
Some of the responsibility for what happened last week rests with authorities with oversight of telecommunications services, and there should be assurance by regulators that internal controls are in place for maintenance, software and other updates.
He said there should be a public interest in telecommunications.
The email is bshecter@postmedia.
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