On Wednesday, Rogers, Telus, Bell and other telecoms agreed to sign a network safety plan, to assist each other in the event of major outages, such as the devastating Rogers nationwide outage in July.
Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said yesterday, “the Rogers outage of July 8 was unacceptable, and we must do everything possible to ensure something similar does not happen again in the future, as I said at the time.” He added, “Canadians deserve strong, reliable, and affordable telecommunications networks.”
Now, this agreement between telecoms sounds like fairies and rainbows, but it’s not good enough for the federal New Democratic Party (NDP).
The NDP released a statement on Thursday, slamming Justin Trudeau’s Liberals for failing to take on big telecoms, leaving Canadians behind.
“Despite paying some of the highest rates in the world for cellphone services, many Canadians and businesses were left without any access to cell service during a recent Rogers outage, including the ability to call 9-11 during life-threatening emergencies,” said NDP Critic for Innovation, Science and Industry Brian Masse, in a statement.
“Canadians deserve better. Yesterday’s announcement from Minister Champagne isn’t enough to assure Canadians and does nothing to lower cell service costs,” added Masse.
According to Masse, he said “If the Liberals wanted to help Canadians, they would hold telecom company executives accountable and demand that they put Canadians’ public safety first. Instead, the Liberals continue to protect the profits of giant telecom companies and refuse to end the monopoly that enables high prices and poor service.”
Masse pointed out, “this government only emboldens telecom companies and their monopolistic practices by keeping the door open to the Rogers-Shaw merger.”
“New Democrats will fight to end the telecom monopolies’ outrageous behaviour and ensure Canadians have more affordable services that they can count on,” concluded Masse.
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Ok good. How?
then they should stop supporting them…
You have to shop for redundancy rather than monster data and use a dual sim
phone. Because of heavy marketing everyone thinks they need a lot of data. It costs the cellos nothing. I have a Public Mobile sim at $10 a month that gives me all the phone calls I need. If I am home I make calls on my free fongo voip account using wifi so I never use up the 100 monthly minutes. Comes with a little data but I have Lucky Mobile $15 data only sim with 750 megs as a backup. Using Android data saver this works fine. If one company has an outage I can make a call on the other sim. And I can drop the data sim any time and I still have the $10 PM. with a little data. For $25 I can make calls 3 different ways. If I need more data on a holiday I’ll swap out the Lucky Mobile data sim for a 10 gig Phonebox sim for a month.