Rogers names new CTO after masssive network failure

Rogers Communications has named a new chief technology officer, just two weeks after its massive network outage on July 8 that left millions of Canadians unplugged.

Jorge Fernandes will be succeeded by Ron McKenzie as the new CTO immediately.

Ron McKenzie was appointed as Rogers’ new CTO, effective immediately. Source: Rogers

McKenzie was the president of Rogers for Business between June 2021 and July 2022. He also led technical operations at Rogers for more than two years.

Before joining Rogers, McKenzie held senior leadership roles at Shaw Communications. Combined, he has more than 30 years of experience in the telecommunications industry in both Canada and the U.S.

Jorge Fernandes was Rogers’ CTO between 2018 and 2022. Before that, he had 15-years of experience at Vodafone, one of Europe’s largest telecommunications providers.

The July 2022 outage bore a resemblance to the Rogers mobile service outage that occurred just one year prior. In April 2021, a software update took down Rogers mobile services for an entire day. This time, the company blamed a maintenance update for the outage. In a report, MobileSyrup explained that the update caused its routers to malfunction, preventing them from directing network traffic.

Rogers has issued apologies along with crediting customers the equivalent of five days of service charges. In addition, the company is looking into building safeguards to prevent a similar event, including separating its wireless and wireline networks.

Would you recommend this article?

Share

Thanks for taking the time to let us know what you think of this article!
We'd love to hear your opinion about this or any other story you read in our publication.


Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

Featured Download

Tom Li
Tom Li
Telecommunication and consumer hardware are Tom's main beats at Channel Daily News. He loves to talk about Canada's network infrastructure, semiconductor products, and of course, anything hot and new in the consumer technology space. You'll also occasionally see his name appended to articles on cloud, security, and SaaS-related news. If you're ever up for a lengthy discussion about the nuances of each of the above sectors or have an upcoming product that people will love, feel free to drop him a line at [email protected].

Related Tech News

Featured Tech Jobs

 

CDN in your inbox

CDN delivers a critical analysis of the competitive landscape detailing both the challenges and opportunities facing solution providers. CDN's email newsletter details the most important news and commentary from the channel.