Rogers Communications may be spending C$75 million towards by offering credit of five days service to customers, after the telecoms operator suffered a major outage.
Rogers has come under pressure from Canadian government, mobile phone customers and politicians over last Friday’s glitch that lasted 19 hours.
On Tuesday, the telecoms regulator ordered Rogers to respond within 10 days to its questions about the network outage that impacted millions of Canadians.
“We know that we need to earn back their trust, and as a first step, we will be crediting our customers with the equivalent of five days service,” Rogers said in a statement late on Tuesday.
Rogers, which has about 10 million wireless subscribers and 2.25 million retail internet subscribers, would have to credit between C$65 million to C$75 million to customers in the third quarter due to the outage, Scotiabank estimated in a note on Monday.
Rogers reported a net income of C$1.56 billion in 2021.
The mobile network glitch has cast doubt over Rogers’ C$20 billion ($15.4 billion) takeover of smaller rival Shaw Communications.
Rogers needs to provide a detailed account as to “why” and “how” the outage happened, and what measures the company is putting in place to prevent future outages, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said in a news statement.
CRTC CEO Ian Scott has asked Rogers more than 50 pointed questions relating to the outage and the company has until July 22 to provide its responses, after which the CRTC will decide what additional measures need to be taken.
On Monday, the Canadian minister for industries Francois-Philippe Champagne announced a probe over network outage.
The Retail Council of Canada which has close to 45,000 retailers as its members said that it is quantifying the financial impact of Friday’s network outage on its members.
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) that has 95,000 small business as its members said the impact of the Rogers outage on small businesses has been huge due to lost sales on ecommerce sites.
