Rogers says it will be investing $10 billion to prevent future outages

Rogers Communications announced this past weekend that it is investing $10 billion over the next three years in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to prevent future outages like the one that rocked Canada earlier this month.

The announcement comes weeks after the telecommunications company experienced a massive network outage that left millions of Canadians without internet, data and banking services.

Chief Executive Officer of Rogers Tony Staffieri said this week that the company is working on a formal agreement between carriers to switch 911 calls over to other networks automatically in the event of an outage.

Staffieri testified to the House of Commons industry committee on Monday that Rogers is specifically planning to spend at least $250 million for an "always on" network.

The proposed network would separate wireless and internet services, which would help customers avoid an outage of both data and internet at the same time.

This month's mass outage, which last almost 19 hours, made it difficult for some customers to dial 911 and receive emergency alerts.

Rogers has explained that the outage stemmed from a coding error between two pieces of equipment from separate vendors, which flooded the network with data and overwhelmed the infrastructure.

Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne has given Rogers 60 days to find a solution for seamless transitions of connectivity between providers during the event of an outage, and specifically when it comes to 911 access.