Telecom Customer Experience: Customer communications during the next outage. What telcos and utilities should rehearse before winter hits.
On July 13, 2026, a fibre cut in Oakville took Cogeco down across Ontario for about three hours. Stores in Cornwall went cash only. And the line that stuck with me came from Cogeco itself. Its outage page was also affected.
Think about that for a second. The one page built for the worst afternoon of the year lived on the network that had just gone dark.
It wasn’t a first. When Rogers went down on July 8, 2022, more than 12 million customers lost service for about 26 hours, Interac stopped, and it took Rogers about 14 hours to find the cause. The Xona Partners report the CRTC commissioned put the communications failure in one sentence: Rogers staff relied on the company’s own mobile and internet services to talk to each other. The company had to source SIM cards from other carriers to run its own incident.
So here’s my argument, and it’s a marketing argument, not an engineering one. The outage is an engineering problem. What your customers remember is the communication. And the companies that handle it well don’t improvise. They’ve rehearsed.
What the rules already say, and what they don’t
Ontario’s power utilities have had a real rule since May 5, 2025. Section 4.9 of the Distribution System Code says a utility has to give an estimated restoration time no more than four hours after it finishes assessing the damage, update it every time it changes, and keep at least one way of reaching customers working at all times: website, social media, email, text, a phone line or radio. In a long event, the estimate gets refreshed every six hours after the first 48, and the utility has to survey customers within 60 days on how well they were kept informed.
That rule exists because of March 2025. The ice storm that month left more than 600,000 Hydro One customers without power, and the company’s ombudsman wrote in February 2026 that complaints rose 25.5 percent and that the storm “reignited focus on the accuracy” of restoration estimates, which was already his office’s long-standing concern.
Telecom is looser. The 12 carriers that signed the reliability agreement with Ottawa in September 2022 committed to tell the public within two hours which services are down, roughly where, when they expect restoration, and whether 9-1-1 still works. That’s a good template, and I’ll come back to it. But the CRTC’s outage decision of September 4, 2025 requires carriers to notify the regulator within two hours and 9-1-1 centres within 30 minutes. It says nothing about notifying customers.
The CRTC opened a separate consultation the same day on exactly that question, plus whether refunds should be automatic when the provider itself detects an outage. Consumer groups asked for a notice at 30 minutes of degraded service and refund tiers starting as low as 15 minutes. The carriers warned about alert fatigue. As of September 22, 2026, more than a year later, there’s no decision.
Which means, for a telco, the rehearsal is voluntary. For a utility in Ontario, it’s the code. Either way, the customer doesn’t grade you on the rulebook.
Five things to rehearse before December
Message on a channel you don’t own. Cogeco’s outage page and Rogers’ incident team failed the same way. If your status page, your app and your support line all ride on your own network, you have no way to talk to anyone on the day it matters. Text through another carrier, email, a social account somebody can post to from a phone on a different network. When Telus lost the northwest of BC on August 2, 2026, the province’s own emergency site told residents to follow it on X and Facebook. Rehearse the failover, not just the message.
Pre-write the notice, and check the data behind it. The carrier agreement gives you the four lines: which services, where, when, and whether 9-1-1 works. Write them now. Then look at the harder part, which is who gets them. Which customers sit in the affected area? Which ones told you they want text and not email? From April 13, 2027, CRTC 2026-67 requires contract and promotion notices in the customer’s chosen channel anyway. Outage notices are the cheapest place to find out whether that data is clean.
Say the restoration time, then update it when it moves. Ontario’s four-hour rule is a good discipline for anyone. Bell’s only public statement during its Ontario and Quebec internet outage on May 21, 2025 was that it was “working to restore service as quickly as possible.” No time. J.D. Power’s 2026 utilities outlook, US data, puts a number on the difference: satisfaction runs 52 points higher, on a 1,000-point scale, when customers get timely, accurate outage information.
Decide the credit before the outage, not after. Rogers gave five days of credit in 2022, about $150 million, applied automatically. Bell customers who phoned in after May 21, 2025 got anywhere from $1.67 to $67. The only mandatory rule in Canadian telecom belongs to Northwestel: since January 16, 2025, any internet outage of 24 hours or more earns a prorated credit, shown as a separate line on the bill, within three billing cycles. Whatever your policy is, write it down before winter, because case by case is what you do when you haven’t decided.
Check the bill that goes out the week after. This is the one nobody rehearses. Nova Scotia Power paused billing after its April 2025 cyberattack, then ran about half its customers on estimated bills for nearly a year. One customer got a $3,365 bill. Non-payment doubled. Late fees come back October 1, 2026, and the province’s energy regulator is now holding an inquiry that covers billing estimation and customer communications. Hydro One’s ombudsman says the same thing more quietly: customers on estimated reads “are often surprised” when the real read produces a catch-up bill.
The bill is where the outage actually ends
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. The outage notice is the message customers want during the event. The bill is the message they read after it. If the credit you promised isn’t on it, or the estimate is wrong, or the proration doesn’t match what they lost, the outage isn’t over. It just moved from the network team to the call centre.
That’s the part we build for. hiperValidation checks 100 percent of billing data before a statement goes out, which in the week after a storm means every credit applied, every estimated read flagged, every proration checked against the customer’s plan. hiperCCM sends the notice in the channel the customer chose, then puts the credit on the bill with a line that explains it. Banco Carrefour runs 5 million personalized communications a month through it, and validates every invoice first.
The Weather Network’s fall forecast, published September 9, 2026, says one of the strongest El Niño events ever observed is intensifying. A milder winter on average, they think. Then the line that matters: “one major event can define how an entire season is remembered.”
You won’t pick the event. You can pick how ready the message is. If you’d like to see what a validated post-outage bill looks like on your own data, Request a Demo (https://fastmovn.com/en/home/#request-a-demo).
Fast Movn is a Canadian technology company based in Vancouver, BC. Our platform pairs hiperValidation, which checks 100 percent of billing data before it reaches the customer, with hiperCCM, which turns the bill into a personalized, multichannel conversation. We work with telecom, financial services and utility companies across Brazil and North America.
Sources
Cornwall Newswatch, “Cogeco outage affects Cornwall, SDG customers,” July 13, 2026. https://www.cornwallnewswatch.com/2026/07/13/cogeco-outage-affects-cornwall-sdg-customers/
Quinte News, “Internet back online after Cogeco outages affect Quinte region,” July 13, 2026. https://www.quintenews.com/2026/07/13/internet-back-online-after-cogeco-outages-affect-quinte-region/
Xona Partners, “Rogers Network Outage July 2022,” report prepared for the CRTC, July 2024. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/publications/reports/xona2024.htm
Rogers Communications, second quarter 2022 results, July 27, 2022 (five days of credits, approximately $150 million). https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2022/07/27/2486701/0/en/Rogers-Communications-Reports-Second-Quarter-2022-Results.html
Ontario Energy Board, Distribution System Code, section 4.9 (in force May 5, 2025). https://www.oeb.ca/sites/default/files/Distribution_System_Code.pdf
Hydro One Ombudsman, 2025 Annual Report, February 2026. https://www.hydrooneombudsman.com/app/uploads/2026/02/2025_HydroOneOmbudsmanAnnualReport-Final.pdf
Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, Memorandum of Understanding on Telecommunications Reliability, effective September 9, 2022. https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/ised/en/memorandum-understanding-telecommunications-reliability
CRTC, Telecom Decision CRTC 2025-225, major service outage notifications and reporting, September 4, 2025. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2025/2025-225.htm
CRTC, Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2025-227, consumer protections during outages or disruptions, September 4, 2025. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2025/2025-227.htm
Canadian Telecommunications Association, reply comments in CRTC 2025-227, December 15, 2025. https://canadatelecoms.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/2025.12.15-Reply-CRTC-2025-227-Consumer-protections-during-outages-or-disruptions.pdf
EmergencyInfoBC, service outage, August 2, 2026. https://www.emergencyinfobc.gov.bc.ca/event/service-outage-02august2026/
CRTC, Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2026-67, Enhancing customer notifications, April 13, 2026. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2026/2026-67.htm
blogTO, “Bell internet outage hits Ontario and Quebec,” May 21, 2025. https://www.blogto.com/city/2025/05/bell-internet-outage-ontario-quebec-canada/
blogTO, “Bell Canada customers getting credits after outage,” May 2025. https://www.blogto.com/tech/2025/05/bell-canada-customers-credit-outage/
J.D. Power, Utilities Outlook 2026, January 20, 2026. https://www.jdpower.com/business/resources/utilities-outlook-2026
CRTC, Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2025-9, Northwestel service quality and outage credits, January 16, 2025. https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2025/2025-9.htm
Global News, “Nova Scotia Power billing issues,” February 12, 2026. https://globalnews.ca/news/11664968/nova-scotia-power-billing-issues/
Global News, “Nova Scotia Power late fees return October 1,” July 15, 2026. https://globalnews.ca/news/11966772/nova-scotia-power-late-fees/
Canadian Occupational Safety, “N.S. energy regulator to hold dual inquiry into utility cyberattack and billing fallout,” February 11, 2026. https://www.thesafetymag.com/ca/topics/technology/ns-energy-regulator-to-hold-dual-inquiry-into-utility-cyberattack-and-billing-fallout/547279
Hiperstream, Banco Carrefour case study (100 percent of invoice data validated, 5 million personalized messages a month). Fast Movn internal file.
The Weather Network, “Canada’s fall 2026 forecast,” September 9, 2026. https://www.theweathernetwork.com/en/news/weather/seasonal/canada-2026-fall-forecast
