Rogers Is Paying Out Over $150 Million In Outage Credits & Here's What Else They've Promised
That's a lot of money! 💸
The Rogers Canada headquarters. Right: A pile of Canadian money.
After the nationwide outage this July, Rogers Canada has set aside a whole lot of money for customer credits in the third quarter of 2022.
In a July 27 release by the company, it announced that approximately $150 million is going to be added to the company's operating costs for the months of July, August and September.
It's a number the Toronto Star says is less than what financial analysts predicted.
The figure is what the company is expecting it'll have to pay out in credits to customers affected by the outage of wireline and wireless services that took place on July 8.
For most of the day, Rogers customers were unable to use services like talk, text, TV and the internet.
"As a result of the outage, and our promise to customers that we would proactively provide five days of credits on their services, we estimate we will refund approximately $150 million," said the company.
To "win back" the trust of Canadians, the company recently announced a series of changes to its network.
In a July 25 parliamentary hearing, Rogers CEO and President Tony Staffieri promised that the company was going to set up fully separate wireless and wireline networks.
The two networks would create an "always on" platform that would cover services and prevent widespread outages in the future.
Rogers has also promised to invest $10 billion into their network to strengthen and update it over the next three years.
The July 8 outage saw Rogers customers unable to use their mobile phones and home internet for most of the day — even leaving them unable to contact the emergency services.
Not only that, but Rogers-powered debit services were also out, making it impossible for many to make purchases with their bank cards.
This also affected non-Rogers customers, with other networks experiencing delays as well as an inability to contact Rogers users.
Despite being given the five-day credit, a class-action lawsuit was filed in Montreal on July 11, calling for Rogers to pay all those impacted, including non-customers, $400.
In the same July 27 statement, Rogers also reported that the incoming merger with Shaw will be delayed from July 31, 2022, to January 31, 2023.
The merger would see the two companies come under one roof together but has been subject to controversy.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has even started a petition against the merger, calling telecommunications in Canada a "monopoly."