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LETTER: Maple Ridge resident said outage pointed out flaws with communications

Many people were unable to conduct regular activities that day
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The Friday, July 8 outage impacted access to law enforcement, health care services and banking services in various parts of the country. (Andrea DeMeer/Black Press Media)

Dear Editor,

On Friday morning, I went shopping at a local grocery store. There were no cars, so I thought perhaps the store was closed. It wasn’t, they just couldn’t do business unless the shopper had cash. Fortunately, I did.

Then I went to get stamps at a local Canada Post substation. I bought a few stamps, but couldn’t buy as many as I’d planned, because I didn’t have enough cash left. Then I went to another grocery store and couldn’t use my debit card. (I went to my credit union to get cash and then went back to finish shopping.)

I understand that many transactions were not able to be carried out because one of our telecoms was unable to provide service. There was a lot of business that didn’t happen on Friday.

I also understand that people couldn’t call 911. This worries me more than business not being transacted. Shouldn’t we be keeping our copper phone lines for any time that our power is out or any time our telecoms are failing us?

If we used a fiber-optic system instead of any wireless, would this failure have happened? Fiber-optic systems without wireless links are more secure and use far less energy than wireless systems.

Why are so many of us being forced to use (electromagnetic-producing) wireless technologies when we prefer not to.

Sheila Pratt, Maple Ridge

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• READ MORE: Tech outage affected ferries, ATMs and much more

• READ MORE: Industry minister to meet with Rogers CEO after ‘unacceptable’ network outage

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