City of Toronto eyeing ways to reduce reliance on Rogers after outage

The outage affected everything from city wading pools to televised meetings, building security systems, and traffic light operations in some parts of the city.

Thestar.com
July 12, 2022
Francine Kopun

The City of Toronto has already begun looking at ways to reduce its reliance on Rogers after the telecommunications provider suffered a nationwide outage that lasted most of Friday.

The outage affected everything from city wading pools to televised meetings, building security systems, and traffic light operations in some parts of the city.

Toronto police fielded an additional 2,000 calls over average on Friday alone.

“Our 911 service was always fully functioning and working despite the outage,” said police spokesperson Connie Osborne.

“We did receive a number of calls where there was no caller on the line when we answered and some of these could be attributed to the outage of their telecommunications provider. However, all these callers were called back once their network was restored.”

The Toronto police 911 service takes all emergency calls, including medical calls, not just crimes in progress, she noted.

A city spokesperson said issues related to the Rogers outage affecting the public were confined mainly to debit and credit payment issues at city facilities including golf courses, ferry docks, waste drop-off sites and service counters. Some wading pools could not open due to the requirement for an operating cellphone at each location in the event of an emergency.

“While all of the city’s 2,400 traffic signals continued to operate normally, 630 intersections use the Rogers cellular network for communication with the city’s central traffic control system for signal timing changes,” according to the city.

“These 630 signals continued to operate normally, and signal timing changes were completed on-site by staff where needed.”

The city also relies on the Rogers GSM network to help remotely monitor fire alarm and sprinkler systems in municipal buildings.

Moving forward, city contracts will specify that tenders must “provide two independent communications pathways for all monitored properties and install a second communication pathway in all sites with only Rogers GSM communication,” according to the city.

Until now, Rogers has been the sole service provider for cable TV for the city. “Now the city will review its legacy Cable TV contract to source diverse service providers,” according to a spokesperson.

“As of Saturday morning, City services had resumed normal operations, including processing payments and opening wading pools. In the coming weeks, staff will review the City response and overall impacts of the outage.”

Coun. Josh Matlow plans to submit a member’s motion at the city council meeting next week asking that the city manager report back in early 2023 on the full cost to the Toronto economy of the outage, as well as the city services and functions that were disrupted.

The motion, seconded by Coun. Mike Colle, also asks staff to look at using ConnectTO infrastructure to provide a public alternative to Rogers and other privately-owned telecommunications companies.

A spokesperson for the Toronto Parking Authority said pay-and-display machines were not operational on Friday and that the Green P app was not accessible to Rogers customers because of the outage.

“We determined to not require payment on street or in non-gated lots -- to be fair across the board,” the parking authority said.

The Bike Share Toronto system was completely down all day due to the outage until late Friday night.

“We are still assessing the financial effect of the outage, but we probably lost 60-70 per cent of our business -- parking and Bike Share together,” the agency added.