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Taking a look at the Rogers outage CRTC letter (wdkwwdk.com)
42 points by kevin_nisbet on July 31, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments


This is a very thoughtful look at what was (and wasn't) presented. It feels like nothing will come of this, Rogers will try and ride the media cycle until people have forgotten (like the October/2021, and April/2020 events). Maybe it helps with the pending Shaw purchase ("we're not a monopoly risk, we can't even keep the lights on!".. hopefully not).

They've been thrice measured in similar ways over the last two years and found lacking in disaster recovery, operations and change management.


The article mentions that 9-1-1 calls can be made without a SIM card, and the phone will attach to the strongest network, regardless of the phone’s home network.

Out of curiosity, is the same thing true if the phone is in Airplane mode? Or would attempting to make an emergency call instruct the phone to attach to its home network?


That's a great question, I don't think I ever tried to do an emergency call while in airplane mode in the lab so I don't know the answer with authority. It's a little bit closer to the radio technology than I tended to operate at.

This is likely going to depend on the OS implementation, since lots of OSes allow emergency calls even while the phone is locked (from the lock or password entry screen). My speculation would be that the emergency call would activate the cellular modem to do the emergency call, but as I said I'm not confident in that answer (and please don't try it to just test it out).

> Or would attempting to make an emergency call instruct the phone to attach to its home network?

That's a great question, I don't think I ever tried to do an emergency call while in airplane mode so I don't know the answer with authority.

This is likely going to depend on the OS implementation, since lots of OSes allow emergency calls even while the phone is locked (from the lock or password entry screen). My speculation would be that the emergency call would activate the cellular modem to do the emergency call and go back into airplane mode afterwards. But I'm really not sure and it's been a few years since I've looked at this.

> Or would attempting to make an emergency call instruct the phone to attach to its home network?

The phone wouldn't need to attach to it's home network first in any circumstance. Even when you're already connected to your home network, the device actually re-attaches itself in an emergency mode (atleast in LTE/VoLTE, I don't know about the older technologies I didn't work on). You would likely still use your own network, as the first frequencies the phone will be the frequencies in use by your own carrier.


I’ve been waiting for a post like this. Thanks for writing it up. Even though the letter is light on details, it’s made up for with the extra context this article provides.

Minor spelling mistake: SaskTel, not Sasktell


Thanks and fixed the typo... thanks for pointing that out.




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