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Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

reuters.com

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Re: Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

#381

Post by ezekiel11 »

LegitShady wrote: post #372
ezekiel11 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the thing is they blame immigrants but won't do anything against the real driver of housing unaffordability, the collusion of regulators and corporations offering large liquidity to housing market. its breaking apart. the city of vancouver is broke and basic services are being scaled back. theres also a large brain drain here. only idiots work for vancouver startups/companies that tries to gaslight you that sunshine…

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…

that's an awful long winded way say you blame immigrants for problems that have long existed before their arrival

Re: Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

#382

Post by ripdog »

dredmorbius wrote: post #115
amscanne wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a lot of experience in both places. Americans may think think they do, but I don’t think so. As bad as Comcast and others are in the USA, I have found them to be far more efficient and competitive than Rogers or Bell in Canada. Same for banks in Canada. It’s unbelievable what they do and get away with. And airlines. Rather, Airline. I believe there’s a cultural element here: Canadians are more risk adverse and…

New Zealand often seems like a toy country with one of everything. There's the One Bank, the One Telecom, the One Airline. Not ... exactly. But effectively, yes. A combination of a tiny population (5.1 millions) and a long way from nowhere (roughly 3,200 km / 2,000 mi from Sydney). Australia and Canada already have issues from their own small scale (and vast land areas). NZ takes it up a notch.

Interesting you'd say that in a thread about ISPs, considering we have regulation-enforced separation between the owners of our government-funded nation-wide FTTH network and the actual service providers. This means I have over a dozen ISPs to choose from, and they all over gigabit fibre and compete on price, customer service, and things like IPv6 or CG-NAT.

Re: Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

#383

Post by 37 »

voisin wrote: post #344
37 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see so many people get these two conflated, across the board, any time something like this happens. Some big leak or outage or whatever. The shocking part is not that they are giving no updates. Everyone is to expect that. The shocking part is that we (collectively) don't care that they give no updates, and let them get away with it.

What actionable steps can consumers perform?

This is probably the best question that can be asked.

Vote with our wallet? C'mon, what else?

>What actionable steps can consumers perform?

Re: Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

#384

Post by vinay427 »

jbm wrote: post #308
msbarnett wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swoop is owned by WestJet, it's just their discount brand. Flair's actually independent and used to be based in Kelowna but is now based in Edmonton – they're probably who GP is thinking of.

I'm incredibly thankful to Flair as my flight to Montreal now costs 1/3rd what it cost last year. It's unfortunate that I need to visit a province that discriminates against my mother with its regressive laws, but at least I can pay my respects and get out without contributing to the oligopoly that runs the country.

> a province that discriminates against my mother with its regressive laws

Can you elaborate? I only very vaguely follow Quebec news so I'm curious what you're referring to.

Re: Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

#385

Post by jleyank »

Given that private business won’t magically reduce their profits to have (more) backups and hire more competent it staff, I guess you all want the internet to return to being a regulated utility? The only really serious aspects were letting debit transactions be run by a single provider along with some aspects of border control. These should have mandated fall over to other vendors to keep running. The banks and credit cards did fine as long as the store was on line.

Re: Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

#386

Post by specialist »

dmix wrote: post #339
jvm___ wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

There really should be a big investment in an anti-regulatory capture organization the way there are anti-trust lawyers and privacy czars. Which would have the dual purpose of employing researchers and public outreach and have powers to stop hires, limit grants/subsidies, and collaborates with with anti-trust. But who are we kidding, politicians never bite the hands that feed them.

I'm interested in any and all ideas to mitigate regulatory capture, no matter how crazy.

My only notions so far:

- Add explicit carve outs for customers (of the regulated entity). Where the representatives are chosen by jury duty or sortition or other suitably random method, so they too are resistant to capture.

- The customer's have veto power. Maybe thru an ombudsman structure. Maybe thru majority of the regulatory body.

- Like citizen's assemblies, customers have investigatory powers. They can ask questions, they cannot be denied. They benefit from expert testimony.

- No artificial deadlines for deliberations. Some decisions just take longer.

- All decisions (laws, rules, procedures) have built-in expiration (TTL), and must therefore be regularly reauthorized.

- All artifacts and hearings made public by default.

- Pay board members and their staff. So that normal people can afford to serve.

> a big investment in an anti-regulatory capture organization

I think you're on to something.

I keep thinking of the law practice that makes terrific money suing pharmacy benefit managers (or maybe just the pharmas themselves) for violating pricing rules. Sorry, no cite.

Re: Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

#387

Post by cmrdporcupine »

voisin wrote: post #346
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? I saw that and I was like... who gave this guy the right to talk to the media? If I were corporate communications at Rogers I'd be freaking that this person made it onto camera with this crap (Luckily my phone is Freedom and my Internet is an independent small Hamilton local ISP.)

Aren’t a lot of smaller ISPs going out of business right now because of the CRTC’s decision to allow the big 3 to charge more for wholesale rates? I recall TelSavvy being going outspoken about this.

I'm not sure of their business state, but yeah, it's not good.

For me, I'm rural and I use a 900mhz point to point wireless connection that caps out around 15-20mbps on a good day. The upside is it's provided by a local old school indie ISP ("NetAccess"). It's $130 CAD a month, which is... expensive... but unlimited which is far cry from the theft that Rogers was performing on me prior with the 3g (then LTE) connection I had that at first capped me at 25G per month @ $100 a month and eventually went up to a "generous" 100G and then charged insane overage fees. My teen daughter ran us up a $400 bill one month.

Bell and Rogers are now offering more competitive rural options (at the behest of the gov't) but I refuse to give them any more money.

Re: Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

#388

Post by specialist »

amelius wrote: post #232
UkrainianJew wrote: post #121

The utterly inefficient and overpriced Canadian telecoms exist only because we allow one specific behavior: 1. A new local player comes to town, builds their own infrastructure (e.g. connects one building to fiber) and starts offering competitive service. 2. Rogers/Shaw/Bell/Telus immediately offer better terms for the residents of that building. 3. The competitor runs out of money and leaves. 4. The telecoms revert…

Sounds like how the free market was designed to work. Not that I find it a particularly good design, though.

Freemium Markets™

aka Pay to play.

Re: Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

#389

Post by specialist »

xwolfi wrote: post #319
Teever wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utilities like telecoms can't be free market due to the natural monopoly effect. We can't have a hundred different companies burying infrastructure or stringing up lines on poles.

You can, but profitability is limited. You can have 5/6 maybe max in a dense country. With 4 in France, they each slowly fibered the whole country reaching an approximate 25% coverage each and compete in wave: one day they are at 20MBps and suddenly one explodes at 100 and the rest run after to restabilize market share. If they dont they all get fined by the regulator looking at european average speeds.

Yes and: Profitability is predetermined. Converting public goods and services into securities. Ideally. So a public utility issues bonds, instead of stocks.

Re: Rogers network outage across Canada hits banks, businesses and consumers

#390

Post by horsawlarway »

Alupis wrote: post #355
skipants wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. Rogers/Shaw/Bell/Telus immediately offer better terms for the residents of that building. I was about to write a whole comment about how I've never seen this myself and to disagree with you I was going to compare the price of Bell Fibre in my building to Beanfield. The latter of which I have at $50/mo at 1Gbps. But then I loaded up Bell's availability page and entered my address... it was almost like a sick joke…

Is this not just competition working the way it's supposed to? ie, another player shows up in the market, offers a more attractive price and forces the other players to reduce their prices or shed customers. It's not like Bell, in this case, were offering 1Gbps for something absurdly below cost, like $1/mo or something just to drive the new comer out of business. Matching and lowering prices is good for everyone. The…

I think the current answers to your questions are fairly inadequate - so I'm going to give you a more nuanced answer.

> Is this not just competition working the way it's supposed to?

Yes. This is competition working exactly as you would expect it to in a free market: One company is a dominant supplier, and they are able to match rates for a new entrant. They are able to out compete this new company, and they will do so - more marketing, lobbying, cost matching (or undercutting), etc. They have the ability to beat the competition, and they will.

So everything is going exactly as you'd expect - except the points from the parents comment still apply: the consumers in this market are actually getting fucked - the price drop will be temporary, the competitor will be forced out of business and leave, and the total infrastructure investment in the area will go down.

This is what's termed "Market failure". The free market here operates in a way that doesn't increase the well being of all (or even most) participants.

So yes - this is just competition playing out as we'd expect in a free market, but instead of doing what it normally does in an area (force infrastructure updates, service improvements, cost reductions, and higher efficiency as companies compete - all good things) it's doing bad things. Why?

Well - this case is the literal textbook definition of a "Natural monopoly". It turns out that when competition appears, Bell is able to outcompete them not by actually improving, but by leveraging existing infrastructure and scale in a way that the startup company cannot.

The free market isn't making Bell better - they're not having to work any harder or improve. That's great for Bell, but pretty bad for everybody else.

So (at least in theory) we regulate this case of the free market, because we've seen that "normal competition" doesn't actually work here.

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