Rogers to pay five days of service to customers affected by outage

Following the massive outage that impacted customers last week, Rogers Communications will be paying customers the equivalent of five days of service, the company said on Tuesday.

In a statement, the company said that it needed to win back the trust of the public and the first step to doing so would be “crediting our customers with the equivalent of five days service.”

The company, which is one of the three largest telecom providers in the country with 10 million wireless subscribers and 2.25 million retail internet subscribers, is expected to have to pay between C$65 million to C$75 million to customers by the end of the third quarter thanks to the outage according to a note from Scotiabank. 

Also Read: Rogers’s being probed by regulators, customers call for more competition

The outage has cast doubt over Rogers’ C$20 billion acquisition of Shaw Communications. Earlier this year, the  Competition Bureau Canada had rejected the deal saying that the merger would reduce competition in the industry.

Rogers has been under intense scrutiny in the past few days as citizens, politicians and business have demanded accountability for the outage, which lasted 19 hours on Friday, July 8, 2022. 

Also Read: 5G: Do people in India even need it?

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has asked the telecom company to explain “how” and “why” the outage had happened, as well as how they would be preventing something like this from happening again. The regulator have posed a series of more than 50 questions and have given Rogers until July 22 to reply after which they will take action.

Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne had announced a probe into the matter on Monday. Interac, whose customers had continued to feel the impact of the outage even on Monday, is in the process of finding itself a supplementary service provider if an outage is to occur again. 

Also Read: Twitter sues Elon Musk to force him to complete $44 billion purchase

The Retail Council of Canada and The Candaian Federation of Independent Business  which have 45 thousand retailers and 95 thousand small businesses affiliated with them respectively are still assessing the total damage to the businesses. CFIB told Reuters that the losses incurred by small businesses “has been huge.”