The "lessons learned" are all very basic. Things like "separate the network management layer from the data network", "provide the network operation center with backup connectivity", etc.
This is networking 101. Heck, this is engineering 101. The real question is how a network provider as large as Rogers managed to be so poorly engineered in the first place.
Rogers isn't the massive network it is because Canadian consumers love them and want to use them - they just have no choice, and the government does all it can to keep it that way
Someone already mentioned the monopolism/corruption, but Canada also doesn't have much of an engineering/technology culture. Growing up in a BC suburb, it seemed like we were always 5-10 years behind the US on things like home computers, the Internet, cell phones, and e-commerce. And when that stuff did finally arrive, it cost far more than it did down South. And most of the people around me didn't seem to care; nobody I knew was interested in technology, either as an enthusiast or as a consumer.
And anyone who is good at technology generally moves across the border for the much better wages--and actually being able to work at a real tech company.
> Growing up in a BC suburb, it seemed like we were always 5-10 years behind the US on things like home computers, the Internet, cell phones, and e-commerce.
That's interesting. Growing up in rural Ontario, we didn't know any different at the time, but in hindsight we were way ahead of the curve. For example, I didn't know anyone who didn't have a computer at home by the early-to-mid 80s, even families that were, looking back, quite poor. Apparently that would have been unthinkable for our American counterparts. We had high speed internet to the farm by the year 2000, and in the early 2010s fibre was installed to the farm. That was (and still largely is) unheard of stateside.
Similarly, programming was taught in schools not only during my time, but also my parents' time. They recount writing programs on punch cards in high school. My generation was writing BASIC already in elementary school. Meanwhile, our friends to the south were still desperately trying to get programming into the classrooms just a few years ago!
Suburbs are stereotypically where you find boring people, so perhaps the disinterest in technology that you experienced was simply down to that stereotype playing out? The people around me have always seemed quite excited about technology. Perhaps B.C. was/is behind the curve, but I'm not sure that is telling about the country as a whole. I don't see that being the case at all further east.
> Canada also doesn't have much of an engineering/technology culture.
I posit that Canada's situation is that it is primarily focused on engineering/technology culture at the cost of not being focused on business culture. Canada is quite strong in engineering (and in producing engineers), but as you allude to, since the business culture is lacking the engineering and engineers go to where there is a business culture (i.e. the USA). Engineering for engineering's sake does not stand on its own. You also need business to prop it up. And that's where Canada fails.
> When you translate a sentence using Google, or ask Siri to send a text, or play a song recommended by Spotify, you are using a technology that owes much to the innovative research of Geoffrey Hinton.. “deep learning” – a form of artificial intelligence (AI) based on neural networks.. Hinton’s revolutionary contributions to the field have earned him the nickname “the godfather of deep learning,” and have made Canada a hotbed for high tech.. for his excellence as a global pioneer in deep learning, Hinton received a Doctor of Science, honoris causa from the University of Toronto, where he is a University Professor Emeritus.
Our universities are decent, I'll give you that. Great for educating folks like Andrej Karpathy so they can go work for American tech companies, or doing research that can be used by American tech companies.
Also, bringing up Blackberry to make Canada seem relevant kind of has the opposite effect.
> bringing up Blackberry to make Canada seem relevant
The topic of this subthread is not relevance, it's engineering culture.
Canada produced a device that was used by the U.S. President, plus countless executives who could afford any device of that era. It was such a specimen of engineering excellence that you can pay in 2024 to retrofit an original Blackberry keyboard onto a modern iPhone, i.e. no one has yet surpassed that physical keyboard.
U.S. tech companies continue to recruit from U of Waterloo.
This is exactly the complacency that's such a weakness of my country. Canada had one company that made a splash 20 years ago, and that's good enough?
I guess it's fine that engineers will virtually never move from the US to Canada for better pay and more interesting projects, and always the other way around. It's fine that if you ask a Canadian kid to list off apps or tech products that are cool, they won't be able to think of a single Canadian one (most of them won't even have heard of Bombardier). It's fine that our telecoms are some of the worst and most expensive in the world, that this lack of competitiveness and desire for excellence extends to just about every sector of our economy, and Canadians just roll over and take it. It's fine that the brightest students at our universities will leave for other countries with more opportunities and lower cost of living. It's fine, because remember BlackBerry?
It's not about Canada having one (or N) successful companies at any point in time, it's that Canada has a long history of innovation followed by assets going missing. The reason for mentioning Blackberry, Nortel and Instant Pot is "remember NOT TO MAKE THOSE MISTAKES AGAIN".
AI mentioned upthread should be relevant to kids. Besides the foundational early work at U of Toronto, there is at least one Canadian AI startup ($3B+ valuation) with global investors and enterprise customers. They have US offices but HQ remains in Canada. Tenstorrent ($1B valuation) silicon startup recruited chip legend Jim Keller (designer of Ryzen & more). Canadian ATI (GPUs) remains part of AMD.
There's a fantastic woodworking tools vendor that's been around for 40 years, earning kudos for both products and company culture, Lee Valley Tools, which sells to both Canada and US customers.
The multi-millennia history of engineering includes the history of military innovation. If Canada is going to be compared to anyone, Finland is a more natural comparison than the southern neighbor with 10X population and 30X military budget.
Failure to defend (e.g. against economic espionage) national treasures is not the same as never having them, or not having a creative culture that gave birth to tech assets worth stealing. Are future generations going to mourn fallen Canadian technology, or rebuild and learn from past mistakes?
Rogers is a monopoly. There is no incentive to improve. No incentive to hire good people on the floor to fix fundamental issues. Just middle management and c-level suite hoarding all of the money.
At this point, the government can fine them but it’s just passed on to the consumers. Maybe a random regulatory fee. Can’t close them down otherwise risk massive downtime to critical infra (emergency services)
Indeed. When a post mortem lists a bunch of engineering 101 tidbits, the reader should ask themselves why deeper questions are not being asked. The failure was not technical, it has no technical solution, it's about people and orgs.
This is networking 101. Heck, this is engineering 101. The real question is how a network provider as large as Rogers managed to be so poorly engineered in the first place.