The Town of Saugeen Shores is fed up with recent internet and mobile service outages.
It has released a statement today saying “Due to several recent Bell network outages, the Town has written to Bell Canada to express its displeasure and to ask for compensation for the municipality, its residents, and its businesses.”
The Town says the letter was addressed to BCE President and CEO Mirko Bibic, as well as the CRTC, several Crown ministers and Huron-Bruce M.P., Ben Lobb.
Saugeen Shores and other local communities experienced outages on August 30th, September 4th and September 7th. Some took over a day to fix. Customers phones didn’t work, some experienced internet outages, and some businesses Point of Sale systems didn’t work, forcing them to accept cash only.
Mayor Luke Charbonneau says, “This is Bell Canada we’re talking about. It’s a big company. They own a large part of Canada’s network structure. They should have redundancies, they should have a resilient network that isn’t failing repeatedly, week after week.”
A statement from Bell Public Affairs Manager Patricia Garcia to Bayshore Broadcasting News Friday says, “Recent service interruptions in the Port Elgin area are the unfortunate result of separate incidents in a short timespan where our network was impacted by third party actions: one due to a farmer digging in a field, two were the result of damages caused by construction crews, and another was caused by vandalism.”
Garcia continues, “We realize that these interruptions are frustrating for our customers, and our priority is to restore service when these incidents occur as quickly as possible. We are continuing to work with third parties who are digging in the vicinity of Bell network infrastructure to help avoid such issues from occurring.”
Bell Support posted on the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter acknowledging the three outages as they occurred and noting the reasons for two of them.
In the letter from the Town, Charbonneau says the cellular, landline and internet outages have disrupted the municipal water system, local businesses, as well as the ability for residents to contact emergency services.
Charbonneau explains the municipality’s water system relies on Bell’s network. “When you have a network outage it means the water treatment facility can’t communicate with the water storage facility and that means operators have to manually monitor the tank levels, the chlorine levels and manually fill the tank which means they’re working all night and 24 hours a day doing that.” Charbonneau notes the drinking water quality didn’t suffer because of, “outstanding people working in our treatment facilities who just make sure the work gets done.”
Charbonneau’s letter also tells Bell’s Bibic about the lack of communication around the outages or plans to fix the failures, as well as ways to prevent this from happening again.
The Town wants to hear from Bibic about how Bell Canada plans to compensate the Town’s affected residents, businesses, and the municipality for lost revenue and service.