Rogers Communications has its service back on line after a six-hour or so outage Thursday evening. The company has said it will “proactively credit” all of its postpaid customers one day of service for the failure, something that was much on the mind of every Rogers customer last night. The company has not explained what happened. At the height of the outage cell phone users were being advised by straight-faced news anchors to “use a land line instead.” To which the stranded wireless victims might have muttered: “Easy for you to say.” The most common analysis of the wireless phenomenon in recent years is always that customers are cancelling their land lines at a frenetic rate. And that would be fine if the rather over-confident brave new world of wireless was as reliable as its providers advertise. The state of the digital revolution, it appears, is still somewhat fragile. Many will recall the failures that coincided with the downward spiral of the BlackBerry empire.
