Rogers Announces 'enhanced Reliability Plan', C$10 Bln Investment In Wake Of Major Service Outage

(RTTNews) - Canadian technology and media company Rogers Communications Inc. (RCI, RCI.TO) said Sunday that it will invest C$10 billion over the next three years in more oversight, testing and Artificial Intelligence.

In a letter to customers, Rogers' chief executive officer Tony Staffieri outlined the company's "enhanced reliability plan" in response to recent outage, which left millions in Canada without cellphone and internet service for some days.

Staffieri said in the letter that Rogers has made progress on a formal agreement between carriers to switch 911 calls to each other's networks automatically - even in the event of an outage on any carrier's network.

Rogers will physically separate its wireless and internet services to create an 'always on' network - to help make sure its customers don't experience an outage with both cellular and internet services again.

In early July, a massive network outage at Rogers forced more than 10 million customers off their internet or wireless services. It suffered a glitch that lasted nearly 19 hours, disrupting services from flights to banking and emergency 911 calls.

The firm is now under intense pressure from regulators to explain what happened.