Most of Canada’s Internet Is Down. That’s Not Great for a Lot of Things
Up to 50 percent of Canadians may be without internet or mobile during a Rogers outage on Friday. It is hurting cellular, internet and cable services across the country.
With Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal all affected, it seems to be something way up the chain.
Canada is working to get everyone on high speed internet by the mid 2020s.
A huge Rogers outage in Canada has affected both internet and cell service for millions of people today. While many in the U.S. live under near or total internet monopolies, it’s less common for people to use the same cell and internet provider—and this is an example of why it’s probably not a good idea.
Rogers is the leading wireless provider in Canada, and the company has been in the business for almost 20 years. Rogers is also one of the leading internet service providers for Ontario, where almost 40 percent of the entire population of Canada lives. That combination has proven faulty today when Rogers’s network is down for unspecified reasons.
The Verge reports that the outage is affecting Toronto and Ottawa in Ontario as well as Montreal in Quebec. That means whatever is happening goes deeper than just a local tower breakdown. Whatever broke is upstream of both Ontario and Quebec, indicating it’s probably big.
Internet infrastructure is kind of like a tree: big trunks connect major cities or hubs, while smaller branches spread out to fill out the space. In this case, the impact is even greater because Rogers already serves the most populated parts of Canada. For once, the people in the more rural prairie provinces are at an advantage with a different provider.
What could have happened to take down a huge area of internet service in this way? Well, that’s really a big tossup. Internet service is delivered over infrastructural means like cables and wifi networks, but the blood and guts of the actual service is in huge warehouses full of computing hardware. Your computer or smartphone is constantly passing data back and forth with faraway servers and other hardware using a technology called a packet.
The internet only works if everything on both ends is working at the same time. If a server is down and it’s the only available host for a website, you can’t connect to that website. Most ISPs are built with a lot of redundancy and backup connections in case of a local outage, but this transcends the local level—Rogers likely doesn’t have an entire redundancy of its national network. Like the Titanic, the level of damage has overwhelmed existing safeguards.
In this case, the situation is worsened by the fact that people rely on Rogers for their internet and their mobile service. Otherwise, many users could switch to a phone hotspot and just keep working. Canada is in the middle of a huge infrastructural push to get everyone on high-speed internet by the mid 2020s.
Today’s Rogers outage shows one major downside of consolidating that effort to very few providers.
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