Canadians Flock to Coffee Shops As Major Telecom Rogers Suffers Outage

Canada, despite being much larger geographically than its southern neighbor, is a very small place. Three major companies—the "Big Three," Rogers, Bell, and Telus—make up our telecommunications infrastructure, which can result in a quasi-post-apocalyptic scenario if any one of them should run into a problem. Case in point: This morning, I, a Rogers customer, woke up with both no cell coverage and no internet service.

I'm far from alone in this predicament: On Friday morning, Rogers experienced a nationwide service outage that affected Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and areas on the East Coast as well. Besides no cell or internet service, nobody seems to be able to accept debit cards—cash or credit only—and the Toronto Police Service warned about issues affecting 911 calls. Rogers acknowledged the situation in a tweet just before 9 a.m., but I didn't see it, because I didn't have any internet or cell service. 

So, it's not a great situation. For my part, I had to wander for about 45 minutes trying several different coffee shops, including one that posted a very annoyed-seeming notice to their door about their Rogers contract, before I found one that uses Bell. Inside, people were crammed in with their laptops, making calls, apologizing for the noise and explaining the situation to their interlocutors, while every customer who walked in had the same brief conversation with the barista about how nobody has any internet. 

Canada has one of the most concentrated telecom markets in the world, which leads to all sorts of predictable problems. Major outages affecting millions of people at once is one of them. Another is that even when everything is working fine, Canadians pay some of the highest rates for data in the world; certainly much more than people in the U.S. Bringing down the costs for Canadians has been a government priority for a while, but despite the relatively recent introduction of "unlimited" plans, costs remain high and the telecom oligopoly remains fairly undisturbed.