Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

It's not about vancouver. Everyone who wants to live in vancouver knows what they're getting into. It's the fact that at the current rate of immigration they're adding a small city worth of people every single year into the middle of a healthcare service crisis, a housing crisis, an infrastructure and services crisis, etc, and there are no plans to deal with any of those issues.

Of course there's a brain drain going on, but in terms of the average canadian that's not the issue. the issue is that Canada's immigration policy far outpaces its ability to provide for canadians and immigrants, and the government doesn't care that their immigration policy is seriously injuring the quality of life for people already living in canada.

It doesn't affect the people in government because their politics makes questioning immigration targets and policies verboten and you could be ejected from polite society if you do. If you have a problem with their policies and the massive crisis its introduced to the country its obviously because of racism, right?

It literally has nothing to do with vancouver on its own.

The airport in Kitchener has a deal where an airline is offered exclusive rights to a new route out of the airport for, I think, two years. Westjet/Swoop was recently throwing up a storm in the media over this when Flair took advantage of the deal, calling it anti-competitive. Never mind that they had, and still have, access to the same deal.

The reality is that they were only interested in running those routes as long as another airline was. YKF has been down this road before.

Canada's main issue is that we've allowed duopoly on ALL telecom (i.e. we essentially have 2 major national communications networks encompassing all forms of telecom, including phone, TV, cell phone, internet etc.)

Rogers is one of those networks, and it basically covers 30-40% of the country's communications.

There are a few smaller regional players, such as Shaw, Cogeco, Videotron etc. I think we might be the only developed country that's allowed this. I know in the US, there are 5 major mobile networks, some of who offer internet etc., but there are major internet providers separate from the mobile network providers.

The reason this has happened, is because building networks is really expensive making it so that being a regional provider is a tough business, and the 3 major companies have played the laws to their advantage. They've done acquisitions over time, and used the rules around foreign investing to block a lot of major development in 3rd and 4th networks from happening.

This is why the Rogers/Shaw deal should be blocked and the government needs to allow foreign investment to be able to come in and build out networks.

This problem can only be solved in 1 of 2 ways, and only through regulation unfortunately: - A complete overhaul of our rules which will allow foreign investment in our communications networks in Canada - A break up of the 2 networks

The second is not likely to happen. Rogers/Bell/Telus are some of the wealthiest companies in the world, and are at the top in terms of deep pockets in Canada. They will essentially fight the government on any sort of attempt to break them up and handily win.

The government has a much better shot at changing the rules to allow foreign investment, but they don't want to do it. The reason that's the case is because the leadership of the telecom companies has many shared members with prominent politicians, and also outright owns all forms of media in the country except for CBC, Post Media, and Corus.

Post Media is a known right-leaning org and Corus is effectively owned by Shaw, so their sway in the country's politics is not as big as Bell Media and Rogers Media who both own much bigger networks.

That means that they can run a very effective smear campaign against any politician or part who dares to allow foreign competition to enter Canada.

Decisions are made at the margins. It’s always possible to look back and say “they should have done X, and they would have succeed.” It possible that there were many factors, but in my mind no minor change to the strategy would have helped. Had they done what you suggest, I’m sure the respond would have been that they targeted too small a market, or they didn’t cater to folks traveling between major cities frequently.

IIRC Wind was offering unlimited plans at 50% the price of a mediocre plan on major providers. You could have hours of roaming calls and still come out ahead (and this is in the edge case, where you happen to go camping that month). Most things being equal, Canadians broadly prefer to pay more to have a sure thing. It’s not a bad instinct, but it has consequences to how industry is shaped in the long term.