Police in Ottawa, the Canadian capital city, said some callers may have difficulty reaching emergency services via 911 calls. “Today’s outage illustrates the need for more independent competition that will drive more network investment so outages are far less likely,” said Anthony Lacavera, managing director of Globealive, an investment firm that had bid for a wireless provider involved in the Rogers/Shaw deal. The Rogers outage is likely to raise concerns about competition in the industry. and Telus Corp, controls 90 percent of the market share in Canada. Rogers, which has about 10 million wireless subscribers and 2.25 million retail Internet subscribers, is the leading service provider in Ontario, and along with BCE Inc. The outage, which appears to be bigger than the one last year that largely affected consumers, comes as Rogers is attempting to take over rival Shaw Communications in a C$20-billion deal.Ĭanada’s competition bureau blocked Rogers’ proposed purchase of Shaw, saying it would hamper competition in the country where telecom rates are some of the steepest in the world. “We are currently experiencing an outage across our wireline and wireless networks and our technical teams are working hard to restore services as quickly as possible,” Rogers said in a statement.

DUBAI: A major outage of Rogers Communications Inc’s mobile and Internet networks on Friday caused widespread disruptions across Canada, affecting banks and police emergency lines in the second major outage to hit one of the country’s biggest telecom providers in 15 months.

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