The cause of the Telus cell phone issues on Monday have now been identified, according to Liz Sauvé, communications spokesperson with the company.
While originally she reported the issue to be a damaged fibre she has now confirmed it was in fact a damaged card.
"That card sends signals through the fibre so that people are able to make and receive wireless calls," Sauvé said. "So what happened was we were originally pursuing resolving the fibre and we were doing this from Vancouver and this was a challenging one where we thought that we had things resolved and then learned that service was still not restored, learned that it was the card in fact that was causing the issue and then sent someone out immediately to Sechelt then to replace that card in Sechelt. So once that card was replaced, service was fully restored, but of course because it was a pretty complex issue and we had crews working on it both in Vancouver and in Sechelt it took us the day to resolve the issue."
She said Telus "recognizes it was a long outage," and that they "apologize for any inconvenience"
"Now that we've restored service we're going to be doing a deep dive to make sure that this is made right for our customers," Sauvé said. "So our customer team is going to be looking into this to examine the customer accounts and see what happened and we'll be in touch with our customers in the coming days and weeks."
She couldn't say exactly what caused the damaged card in the Telus network in Sechelt.
"Unfortunately equipment failures do happen and we build redundancy into our equipment to prevent service disruptions, but unfortunately in this instance that redundancy did not work so we had to replace the card," she said.
Sauvé noted the outage had nothing to do with the new high-speed fibre optic network being pitched by the company for the Coast.
