CRTC outage and the infamous butt dial [Feb. 4-10]

This week was a busy one for telecom news. As a recap, here’s almost everything that happened in the telecom sector.

Business

Vicky Eatrides took over various responsibilities when she became the chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) a couple of weeks ago, and two federal Ministers have added to the growing list of expectations in a recent letter. One of the issues Minister of Canadian Heritage Pablo Rodriguez and Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne want Eatrides to tackle is how long it takes the CRTC to share decisions.

An outage caused the CRTC’s website, phone lines, and applications to go down earlier this week. While the outage only lasted a couple of hours, the commission didn’t share the cause behind the blackout.

It’s been more than a year since Tony Staffieri became Rogers’ CEO, taking over a position once held by Joe Natale. The family feud that brought Staffieri to his position is hard to forget, and the way Natale allegedly found out about his ousting through a butt dial is part of that story. But in a recent interview with the Toronto Star, Staffieri denies the infamous butt dial ever happened.

SaskTel is expanding its infiNET service to several communities in Southern Saskatchewan. The company says it will start construction in 2023. Once completed, Bengough, Coronach, Rockglen and Willow Bunch will have access to speeds close to 1Gbps.

Several Canadian carriers, including Vidéotron and SaskTel, waived calling and SMS charges to Turkey and Syria following a deadly earthquake on February 6th.

Telus is funding a pilot program at Quebec-based Alma Hospital that uses VR to decrease patient anxiety and prescription medication use.

TekSavvy has upgraded its Cable 75 Unlimited internet package to Cable 100 Unlimited. The new plan will give customers download speeds up to 100Mbps at no extra cost.

Bell has been charging a Vancouver woman for services under a fraudulent account since 2020. The company didn’t investigate until the woman shared a TikTok of her experience.

In its last quarterly report for 2022, Telus reports it added 1120,000 mobile customers, the same number it reported in Q4 2021. Quarterly profits also decreased, but the company says growth in several areas, including in connected devices, is expected.

The company also announced it donated $125 million to various charities and initiatives in 2022.

Deals

Koodo is ending its $10/month Lunar New Year discount on February 14th. The savings apply to the $55/8GB, $60/10GB and $65/15GB options. More details are available here.