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Announcement: March 9th, 2001
Hello, people. As many of you are now aware, a major fiber cut in St. Catherines left every single Rogers@Home subscriber without internet connectivity for over 12 hours, over yesterday and today. The outage began just before 8 PM EST last night (the 8th) and lasted until 8:25 this morning. Some subscribers have reported the outage as lasting even longer than that, but those are the official times at this moment.
On that same note, I wrote an e-mail to senior management at Rogers Cable and received a response from John Tory, chief executive. Just before I received his e-mail, we spoke over the phone where I expressed my extreme dissatisfaction with this latest outage, along with the other problems that are affecting our service right now. I am particularly disturbed at the plethora of accounts I am receiving on a daily basis from subscribers regarding technical support- or lack thereof. Another meeting is in the works to address these issues. I must stress that while I am not at all pleased with the developments over the past few months, I believe that, for now, we should work within our original cooperative framework to get our collective concerns out to management, the public and the regulatory officials. This upcoming meeting will serve that purpose. It shall be attended by myself and several other senior members of our organization. Your concerns will not go unheard. I promise you that.
Below is the e-mail exchange between myself and Mr. Tory.
Regards,
Chris
>
>Chris:
>
>Thank you for your e-mail.
>
>I am indeed aware of the fibre cut you mention as it occupied much of our
>time last night and throughout today. Our technicians worked all night to
>ensure service was restored. The work was conducted in the most difficult
>of circumstances. The cut occurred at a section of CN Rail tracks at one end
>of a bridge. Our technicians had to work in adverse weather conditions -
>and, as I am sure you know, splicing fibre is an extremely delicate
>operation. In addition, we had to take into account the fact that every
>time a train was due, work had to stop, and then be re-started.
>
>The incident occurred around 8pm last night and was resolved at around
>8:30am this morning. We did of course put a voice message with this
>information on our VRU (get right wording).
>
>In addition, we did the widest possible distribution of the information by
>sending out three news bulletins early this morning and talking to more than
>20 reporters from various mediums including radio, television and print.
>
>We are, as of this moment, not sure of the cause of the cut other than some
>news reports that this as an act of vandalism. The investigation of course
>is being carried out by CN Rail and their security team.
>
>I will look forward to discussing this and other issues with you at our
>meeting we have corresponded about and which I hope to schedule shortly.
>
>Thank you,
>
>John H. Tory
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Chris Weisdorf [ mailto:chrisw@rhua.org ]
>Sent: Friday, March 09, 2023 1:33 PM
>To: John Tory
>Cc: Dermot O'Carroll; Bill Lukewich
>Subject: Repercussions of major fiber cut
>
>
>Dear Mr. Tory,
>
>As you are no doubt aware, the fiber cut in St. Catherines by the CN rail
>lines caused every single Rogers@Home subscriber to lose internet
>connectivity for over 12 hours. It occurred last night during prime hours
>and lasted into the morning today. This is the second such fiber cut we've
>had in the past 8 months, with the last one occurring on July 19th. That
>one also happened along the CN rail lines. Subscribers connected to the
>yec1 headend weathered a third fiber cut, which happened within the past
>year. At no point was any information provided to subscribers by Rogers
>regarding these fiber cuts and no compensation was ever given.
>
>In lieu of these facts, I would believe the following to be in order: an
>automatic full 2 day credit to all Rogers@Home subscribers, and a complete
>official explanation of the fiber cut and its related cause(s). This is per
>what we talked about at our meeting in September. I agreed that automatic
>credit should not be given out unless a major outage occurred which
>affected all subscribers in a particular area, or across a whole province.
>This certainly qualifies as such an outage. A full disclosure of the facts
>surrounding this serious outage is definitely warranted.
>
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