Rogers networks reliability and resiliency assessment after 2022-07-08 outage

Rogers Outage: Technical Failures

• Staff depended on Rogers’ own mobile and internet for coordination; when both failed, incident response was severely hampered, leading to improvised use of competitor SIMs.
• Commenters highlight the absence of out‑of‑band (OOB) management as the most egregious issue; without OOB, recovery took ~24 hours.
• Core wireless and wireline networks shared a single IP core; a route leak took down virtually all services nationwide.
• Many view the “lessons learned” (separate management plane, backup connectivity, segregated cores) as basic “networking 101” that should never have been missing.
• Some readers see the official claim that this was “not a design flaw” as inconsistent with the changes now being made.

Root Causes: Culture, Management, and Incentives

• Several argue the true root cause is management’s cost‑vs‑reliability tradeoff, not a single technical mistake.
• Others stress organizational and cultural failure: poor engineering discipline, risky deployment practices, and a “ship it, customers will find bugs” attitude.
• Some see this as emblematic of broader issues in Canadian engineering/business culture and brain drain; others counter that Canada has a strong engineering tradition but weak business/scale‑up culture.

Market Structure, Monopolies, and Regulation

• Strong criticism of Canada’s telecom oligopoly (Rogers, Bell, Telus): high prices, poor service, and little incentive to invest in resiliency.
• The Rogers–Shaw deal is widely seen as entrenching market power; a minority argue Shaw lacked capital and the merger was preferable to collapse.
• Debate over foreign ownership restrictions:
  • One side calls the ban on foreign entrants a “shame” that blocks real competition.
  • Another defends domestic control as a sovereignty issue, arguing competition can be created via spectrum policy and merger limits.
• Workarounds like US plans with Canadian roaming, global eSIMs, and VoIP DIDs are discussed; some see them as niche escapes, others as impractical for mass users.

Broader Implications and Side Effects

• The outage is cited as evidence against a fully cashless economy, given disruption of ATMs and payments.
• Some praise the regulator’s detailed post‑incident report and wish such transparency were mandatory from carriers.
• Thread branches into critiques of Canadian healthcare, housing, and pay levels, with multiple participants considering emigration, while others note every country has serious flaws.