Rogers Canada, please fix the damn internet in Canada

Canadian ISPs definitely have a stronghold on the infrastructure. Can't call it a "monopoly" because there are three of them, but a common name given is "Robelus" which is portmanteau of Rogers/Bell/Telus.

I don't have the numbers on how much they spend to lobby the government every year, but I imagine its a staggering sum.

Canada is a country of oligopolies - everywhere from the products you can buy to the Federal Liberal Party's Trudeau Foundation being the receiving end for paid political favours.

It is hard to think of areas where there is actual competition in Canada, because there are so few.

Media? None, the Federal Liberals fund the approved media and leave the unapproved to fend for itself or die. The approved media is then highly encouraged (unofficially) to tow the Party line and back up anything Trudeau says - especially when it's a fabrication.

Banks? Highly controlled via charters, although actual regulation would make a 1970s Cayman's banker blush.

Food? There is a literal milk cartel. There are three major grocers - all highly vertically integrated. One was just on the news a few years ago for price-fixing bread, and also received untold millions for a refrigeration overhaul from the Federal Government.

Telecom? See the outage.

Law enforcement? The RCMP (Canadian CIA) was recently caught editorializing a report to suit a gun bill Trudeau's Liberals had been waiting for a reason to pass. The Federal Government was also crucial in telling the RCMP what to report and when. In any first world country this would be scandalous and met with a wave of resignations. In Canada, it's a Trudeau Tuesday.

>My phone service is Rogers and my internet is Cogeco, so this outage isn't a huge problem for me. If it were the other way around, I could route through my phone, but it would be a serious impairment. If that happened a lot, I could buy a dedicated adapter but it would cost another "line" of service. Which is a monthly fee, regardless of use. It's not practical for most people to pay redundant contracts - but there's no technical reason for contracts. And it's not even a matter of fixed costs or physical interfaces - the cost of an alternate modem isn't a big problem.

AFAIK there are IOT/esim vendors that provide this sort of service. They give you a sim card that can "roam" between whatever providers you want around the world, and you only pay per MB of data transferred. The only downside is that such services carry a huge markup compared to plans from the providers themselves.

If you were in an area also served by Rogers coaxial plant, the Bell/Telus wireless network bogged down in many areas as it couldn't handle the traffic of those that had simultaneous Rogers mobile and Rogers DOCSIS outages.

Also experienced some jittery/failed calls to USA on Bell/Telus around noon-time EST once the west woke up.

In many countries, the mobile networks can handle heavy bandwidth because they compete against wireline providers for data and have virtually unlimited plans. Not so in Canada.

All of the profit in telecom is selling more service than can be provided at once. People paying for service they never use is their entire business.

I had to change the apn to get data to work on my rogers phone. when they brought it up the apn had defaulted to the petro-can one so going into settings and changing it to the other proper rogers apn had it all working again for me.

Change your DNS to 1.1.1.1 and 4.4.4.4 for secondary that should get you going for now.

CloudFlare thinks it had to do with bad BGP routes:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-view-of-the-rogers-c...

Not much technical details from the Rogers CEO:

> "We now believe we've narrowed the cause to a network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning,"

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rogers-outage-interac-debit...

One can say that India just has a low per capita income. Look at Sweden and Finland then; it's not about (just) per capita income.

What speeds do you get in India for those prices.

For me, it was both the wired home internet which is TekSavvy as well as mobile phone which is on Fido. Both TekSavvy and Fido rely on Rogers behind the scenes.

Ours came back at around 2am EST.

Why the downvotes, HN?

edit: 1 hour later: I was originally asking why HN was downvoting parent comment, but the masses have since reversed their decision and have been upvoting the parent to this comment. Unfortunately, they have begun to downvote me. Ah well, I suppose it comes with the territory. But hey, no question = no answer...

And that current mayor of Toronto and former Rogers executive John Tory was called in to mediate the family dispute.

Better yet, listen to the analyst calls from when the son was running the company. His answers were totally nonsensical. It was abundantly clear that if his last name had not been Rogers, he wouldn’t have been in a senior position.

” Shaw is actively working to secure further control over the Canadian market through its acquisition of Shaw.”

Wow, modern corporate finance really keeps surprising me

It is highly regulated. Most of the problem with Canada (and many other places including aspects of American business) is that businesses are granted oligopolies through highly customized/lobbied for regulation/laws and then they get shitty because they have no incentive to control costs or invest in improving their offering. The role of government in business should be making sure business isn't obviously harming individuals and breaking up business when they get too big and start exercising market power to win rather than innovating. This doesn't happen in Canada and it's why we suck. If you go look at our stock index the S&P 60 basically everything on there that isn't base resource extraction should be broken up but our government is too bought and paid for to do it.

Internet in Canada isn't a monopoly, it's a government-protected oligopoly.

And yes, it sucks. And no, nobody's going to fix it, because Canada's telecoms are far more motivated to lobby to protect themselves than Canadians are to lobby for the government to fix them. It's a classic collective action problem. It's why we can't have nice things.

I'm sure they suck for plenty of reasons (eg. price gouging from lack of competition), but I'm not sure how those reasons relate to this outage. For instance I can imagine that a country with a more diverse telecommunications sector would be less vulnerable to a single provider going down, but this argument doesn't really pan out. I looked up how the market share is broken up in european countries[1][2] and they're roughly split 3 ways between 3 major competitors, which is similar to how the market share is split in canada. If there was a major outage with a major provider in germany, the impact would be roughly the same as with canada.

Overall comments like this feels like a case of "maligned entity is in the news for some reason, so let's bring up all the other reasons we hate them" to me.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/469074/mobile-telephony-...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/375986/market-share-held...

I posted a bit of info here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32041473

Not in any technical sense, but the latest official statement is "We now believe we've narrowed the cause to a network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning."

I'm wondering if this is a software update gone awry.

Yes, governments are great at solving technical problems.

The time for the government to fix it was however many years ago they did whatever it was they did that led to not having a second source for telecon services.

How? You want them to deploy the national guard to rogers HQ to assist them in recovering their networks? All the people who know how their network works are probably helping in some capacity.