Internet outage hits one quarter of Canada

[Senzelian]

23 hours ago, williamcll said:

In the city of Winnipeg, police asked Rogers users who need to call 911 to try to find landlines or phones on another network in case of emergency.

Combining analog phone lines / ISDN and DSL into one was really one of the dumbest ideas ever.

 

[Kisai]

8 hours ago, Senzelian said:

Combining analog phone lines / ISDN and DSL into one was really one of the dumbest ideas ever.

 

Nah. Those are the same thing in the first place.

 

The Rogers outage was not just wireless services. And leadeater is correct, it would have been "better" if the government "owned" the spectrum instead of selling licenses to it (in effect all WISP's are MVNO's,) because it would have resulted in a a more efficient allocation of spectrum, but it would also have created a single point of failure as well.

 

Here's the thing, from a historical perspective, the US and Canadian wireless systems originate with AT&T and the reason everything is the way it is, is from the break up of AT&T in 1982. Telus (BC Tel) was NEVER part of the Bell system, but GTE (later called Verizon West, which became Verizon after a merger with Bell Atlantic in 2000) was the majority investor in BCTel (the predecessor to Telus.) BC Cellular was formed in 1985 after the deregulation of BCTel. Present day Telus, is the former BCTel that merged with Alberta's Telus in 2004. 

 

So when AMPS (Analog) cell service was rolled out, half the spectrum was originally given to AT&T in the US, as the "A" carrier. "B" carriers were everyone else.  AMPS was rolled out nearly at the same time in both the US and Canada, but in Canada, the "A" carrier was Cantel-AT&T (which dropped the branding in 2003 after being bought by Rogers.)

 

So as a matter of historical evolution of the Rogers Wireless (Then Rogers AT&T Wireless) and AT&T Wireless (before it was merged back into AT&T via Cingular/Bellsouth) is why Rogers has as much influence on Canada. 

 

Bell (which is the only company in North America that retains the "Bell" branding post AT&T breakup) is a descendant of the original company before AT&T. Because of this, many people who live in Ontario (and also Quebec) mistakenly believe that Bell "is the only phone company", when that was only ever true in Ontario. It's like the "bagged milk" Canadian trope. There are things that are only true in Ontario, nowhere else, but still has this mythology of being a Canada-wide thing.

 

So on twitter, when Rogers was down, there were of course people basically tweeting out that "all of Canadian internet was down", despite them posting on twitter, proving it's untrue. Likewise people reporting anywhere from 25% to 100% of wireless was down. Also not true. In BC, it was almost of no consequence. Rogers wireless customer service for western Canada is in BC. I'm sure in Ontario, where Rogers cable is likely 50% of the wireline access, and Rogers Wireless is likely >50% of the wireless spectrum was probably a major problem

 

Because spectrum allocations have to move lock-step with the US, otherwise our cell phones don't work in each others countries, often which carrier in the US wins the spectrum, influences which carrier in Canada bids on the spectrum in the first place. Rogers has enough money to outbid everyone, but because of the desire for competition, Canada has repeatedly stumbled in doing so. Shaw bought wireless spectrum, and then sold it to Rogers. Then Shaw bought Wind mobile (renamed to Freedom Mobile) and now Rogers wants to merge with Shaw.

 

Like no matter what the government does to try and create competition, it just will never appear because spectrum is expensive. Nobody can create competition because it's simply too expensive to get the licenses in the first place. That's why when you look at the wireless maps of Canada, Telus is primarily Western Canada, Sasktel is exclusive to Saskatchewan, and everything east is Bell. Telus and Bell don't bid on very many license spectrums in each others markets. Only Rogers does. 

 

So I don't really see any solution without Canada nationalizing Rogers Wireless and then having MVNO's operate off it for competition.

 

[Heliian]

33 minutes ago, Kisai said:

don't really see any solution without Canada nationalizing Rogers Wireless and then having MVNO's operate off it for competition.

Rogers is dogsh@t, at least in Ontario.  Bell has the best service which is also used by Telus.  I have Eastlink internet at home and a Telus phone, zero interruptions. 

[Senzelian]

15 hours ago, Kisai said:

Nah. Those are the same thing in the first place.

They're not the same thing. ISDN and analog phones were bus powered. Your phone would still work, even in a power outage.

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, Senzelian said:

They're not the same thing. ISDN and analog phones were bus powered. Your phone would still work, even in a power outage.

And where do you think the power is coming from? Ever since DTMF (touch tone) phones became popular in the 1980's the local exchange powered the phones, and when DSL became a thing, the DSLAM's are less than 100m from the customer's home, condo or apartment. The rotary system had to be powered by the actual switching system in order for it to work at all.

 

For very practical reasons, that "power" is still supplied today by VOIP ATA's, even though it's unlikely any customer uses a phone that requires it and is powered by it's own power supply. Call Display/ID, requires microchips in order decode the data.

 

At any rate, it's a moot point. Nobody needs to spend $100/mo on a phone line they never use.

 

Also 48V shocks when people ring your phone hurts.

[Senzelian]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

And where do you think the power is coming from?

Uk0 at up to 20km distance.

A/B, i mean... haven't tested it, but we had cable lengths of more than 30km in the city I used to work at.

 

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

At any rate, it's a moot point. Nobody needs to spend $100/mo on a phone line they never use.

Indeed, they're available from 10€ a month. The German Telekom even still supplies true analog phone lines for emergency phones for example.

 

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

Also 48V shocks when people ring your phone hurts.

That's how we used to test if we had power on an A/B line from our PBX. Ring the number and touch the line. Or create a short and see the sparks fly. 

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Senzelian said:

Indeed, they're available from 10€ a month. The German Telekom even still supplies true analog phone lines for emergency phones for example.

When hospitals here went to transition over to VoIP phones it caused quite the headache. PBX used to provide power and now they rely on the network switches, which mostly did not have UPS or not long enough hold up time. Short term solution was "Red phones" still on the old PBX's lol.

 

Long term solution was put in central UPS(s) that protected all network distribution areas in each building and have that feed by the emergency generators, which of course needed upgrading due to the increase load.

 

Sometimes old technology was extremely good at doing the one thing it could and needed to do.

[dalekphalm]

16 hours ago, leadeater said:

When hospitals here went to transition over to VoIP phones it caused quite the headache. PBX used to provide power and now they rely on the network switches, which mostly did not have UPS or not long enough hold up time. Short term solution was "Red phones" still on the old PBX's lol.

 

Long term solution was put in central UPS(s) that protected all network distribution areas in each building and have that feed by the emergency generators, which of course needed upgrading due to the increase load.

 

Sometimes old technology was extremely good at doing the one thing it could and needed to do.

Heh - when we went to a digital PBX system with VOIP (Public library), we definitely planned for power outages in mind.

 

Every single phone is PoE (except cordless... clearly) - all powered by Switches provided by our Provider (it's a somewhat managed PBX system). Every single one of these switches has a dedicated UPS for battery backup - as well as the PBX itself (plus the connection equipment - the PBX communicates out to the rest of the POTS system using a dedicated DSL line). Basically as long as our Phone Provider keeps online, our internal phone system will run for several hours during a power outage.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, dalekphalm said:

Heh - when we went to a digital PBX system with VOIP (Public library), we definitely planned for power outages in mind.

You can plan for but doesn't mean you have been given the required funding to do it 

 

Typical public healthcare though, spend all the money on consulting about how not to spend money and then have nothing left to do the actual job.

[dalekphalm]

37 minutes ago, leadeater said:

You can plan for but doesn't mean you have been given the required funding to do it 

 

Typical public healthcare though, spend all the money on consulting about how not to spend money and then have nothing left to do the actual job.

Fortunately we are relatively arms length from the Government - we have to answer to the Board, but they set funding and don't interfere.

 

We might not always have the budget for everything, but we get to decide how to use that budget within the project (most of the time anyway).

[HenrySalayne]

19 hours ago, Senzelian said:

The German Telekom even still supplies true analog phone lines for emergency phones for example.

"True" is relative; they just put the VoIP adapter in the next DSLAM.

 

On 7/10/2022 at 2:56 PM, Senzelian said:

Combining analog phone lines / ISDN and DSL into one was really one of the dumbest ideas ever.

Not requiring national roaming for areas with bad cell service or if one provider has outages was the dumbest idea ever. Imagine how fast those white spots would have disappeared if your provider would had to pay money to the competition to use their cell service.

[Senzelian]

17 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

Not requiring national roaming for areas with bad cell service or if one provider has outages was the dumbest idea ever. Imagine how fast those white spots would have disappeared if your provider would had to pay money to the competition to use their cell service.

Yeah that too is dumb.

 

17 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

"True" is relative; they just put the VoIP adapter in the next DSLAM.

Not necessarily the next DSLAM, but of course it'll have to be converted to VOIP at some point. Really depends on the infrastructure.

 

But the point of those connections is that they have the abillity to function in case of a local power loss, which is better than it dying because of a cheap router that decided to give up the ghost.