Rogers-Shaw integration should be completed within three years, Tribunal told

The integration of Shaw Communications Inc. properties into the network of Rogers Communications Inc. should be completed rather quickly, Rogers president of integration told the Competition Tribunal on Thursday. “The bulk of the integration will be complete within two years but some aspects may take as long as three, some of the more complicated IT environments and potentially some of the larger turndowns of some network elements,” Dean Prevost said. He was being cross-examined after beginning his testimony on Wednesday. He estimated that 60 to 70 per cent of the work could be accomplished within the first year of Rogers taking over Shaw’s assets. He disputed Competition Bureau attorney Paul Klippenstein’s assertion that Rogers would use several external consultants going forward. While the company did use consultants such as McKinsey & Company during the early days of the merger, Prevost doubted they would be needed now. Klippenstein put on the record that Prevost will receive a bonus of $2 million if the takeover goes ahead. “This is in public, oh great,” the Rogers executive joked. The government lawyer then asked to go into confidential mode, saying his questioning should take 45 minutes to an hour. The cross examination in fact took three hours. The next Rogers executive to testify was chief technology officer Ron McKenzie. He was asked about evidence from his counterparts at Telus Corp. and BCE Inc. He dismissed a statement by Telus vice president of planning and engineering Nazim Benhadid that wireless carriers need to possess their own wireline network to offer effective service to customers. “We don’t own all our own networks and that includes Telus and that includes Bell,” McKenzie stated. “All operators, it’s a trade off of owned versus access via wholesale and the reason you do that is cost, efficiency, capacity.” Rogers leases 2,250 wireline circuits to Telus in eastern Canada, he added. The connection to the grid is necessary so Telus can provide last mile connectivity. Both Rogers attorney Jonathan Lisus and Competition Bureau lawyer Antoine Lippé took McKenzie back to the network outage the Toronto telecom suffered last July. The CTO explained that a filter was removed, causing the failure of the core network. The outage could have happened to anyone, he maintained. “That same scenario can absolutely happen in any converged network, whether it was, in our case, a coding error, whether it’s malicious or whether it’s a threat actor from the outside,” McKenzie stated. “The point being when you have a common converged point in the network, and in this case in the core of the network, we now know and what we’ve learned through this the failure mode of the equipment is where the root cause was as a result of the coding change.” He argued with testimony from Stephen Howe, CTO at Bell. Howe did not differentiate between the access layer of the network and the core, McKenzie said frequently. The Bell executive should have known that, since McKenzie held a two-hour briefing with Howe and his team following the July outage. The afternoon concluded with evidence from Rogers senior VP finance Marisa Fabiano. The bulk of her testimony was delivered in-camera. –Reporting by Paul Park at ppark@thewirereport.ca and editing by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca

Rogers-Shaw integration should be completed within three years, Tribunal told

News | November 25, 2022

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Rogers-Shaw integration should be completed within three years, Tribunal told

News | November 25, 2022

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