Service restored after cut cable cripples Bell, Telus network

A cut cable crippled the shared network of BCE Inc. and Telus Corp. in Atlantic Canada Friday, according to the carriers, whose customers across eastern portions of the country were left without wireless services for roughly five hours. At around 3 p.m., both Telus and Bell announced service had been restored. “Bell services in Atlantic Canada are back online following rerouting and repair of network infrastructure. The outage was caused by accidental damage to multiple fibre network links,” Bell spokeswoman Jacqueline Michelis said in an email, adding that the company “apologizes to our customers for the disruption.” The disruption — experienced on all Bell and Telus mobile properties, including flanker brands Virgin Mobile and Koodo — began shortly before 10 a.m. (eastern) and was “due to an outage on our shared network,” according to Telus, affecting “approximately 885 cell .” Affected Bell services included internet, wireless, TV and landline phone services. Bragg Communications Inc.‘s Eastlink also tweeted late Friday morning that it was “aware of an Interruption impacting our network partners that may affect your ability to place calls.” “Due to a network outage in Atlantic Canada, our Moncton Contact Centre is offline,” WestJet tweeted Friday morning, advising that “wait times are high” and customers should call later unless it was urgent. And according to a CBC/Radio-Canada report, airports in the eastern regions were also seeing disruptions and long lines due to the outage. “The telecommunications issue across Atlantic Canada affected operations today, particularly departing flights,” the Nova Scotia airport tweeted Friday afternoon, warning passengers that even though service had been restored, “passengers should expect delays and some cancellations for the remainder of the day.” Emergency services were also thrown into chaos Friday, with Michelis noting that though Bell wireless 911 service was running, “landline 911 service intermittent.” According to social media messages from first responders in the affected provinces, wireless service was less reliable and residents were being asked to use landline phones if they need to call 911 and not to call the emergency line to test it out. During the outage, the CRTC tweeted that it was monitoring the situation. Gerry Wall, president of telecom consulting company Wall Communications, said in a phone interview that Friday’s outage was an example of why having facilities-based providers has long been the go-to policy in Canada. “I think this is a really good example of what can happen when you’re sharing networks. Because a lot of people have said ‘hey, why do we need even two networks or three networks? We’ve got all these expensive capital networks out there — why do we really need them?’ Well, for redundancy,” Wall said. “To have an option in case something like this ever happened.” Wall said he wouldn’t go so far as to say that facilities-sharing models shouldn’t be explored, “but we do see in this case the danger of network sharing where you have two of the big three both suffer through this disruption.” He said Friday’s disruption wasn’t likely to be something repeated in most other parts of the country, given that he said he believes “for the most part,” the majority of the Bell, Telus and Rogers Communications Inc. networks are distinct, but highlighted some more overlap in Western Canada. “I think Bell is fairly reliant on Telus’ infrastructure out west because they had it already built, so the economics of it makes sense to do it, Wall said. “The downside is, when something like this occurs, you get two of the big three taken with one blow, instead of just one.” — With reporting by Charelle Evelyn at cevelyn@thewirereport.ca and editing by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca

Service restored after cut cable cripples Bell, Telus network

News | August 4, 2017

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Service restored after cut cable cripples Bell, Telus network

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