Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, if you experience blackouts that often your infrastructure is probably prepared for it. Most of Europe basically never has blackouts, so why spend money on backup batteries when they will be deprecated before they'll even be used once?
Canada/US learnt that lesson back in 2003 with the Northeast Blackout. Generators on cell towers where not fueled and some data centre’s caught fire when the cooling went down but the systems didn’t. Lessons where learned. Cell infra is strategic and should not be allowed to go down, everything uses it and people will die if it goes down.
> Lessons were learned.
That's why our emergency services use Rogers as the main, and Telus as a backup - but only after the multi-day Rogers outage that took out payment processors and emergency services this year.
Lessons will have been learned instead of parroted when we have a crown corporation as the main, and a private corporation as the backup. We need cell service to be reliable and rock-solid, even if it's not always cost-competitive to be so. Same reason hospitals, fire, and police services are public: turning a profit is less important than availability.