No Single Network Is Enough, And Canada's Utilities Are Finding Out the Hard Way

Before Dejero ever had a conversation with an electric utility, we were solving a connectivity problem for broadcasters. The challenge: get high-definition video from a breaking news scene, or a remote hockey arena, back to the broadcast studio in real time, without interruption. Dropping a frame wasn’t an option. Cutting out during the third period was unacceptable. We built our entire technology around that constraint.

That background shapes how I see the connectivity challenges facing Canadian electric utilities today. And what I see is an industry that has largely accepted a limitation it doesn’t have to live with: the assumption that “failover” is good enough.

It isn’t.

No Single Network Is Reliable Enough, And We’ve All Seen It

The network outage of 2022 in Canada wasn’t just an inconvenience for smartphone users. It disrupted emergency services, payment systems, and critical communications across the country. And that incident isn’t unique, other carriers have all experienced major regional outages in recent years. Meanwhile, wildfires in Western Canada, ice storms in Ontario and Quebec, and flooding in Atlantic Canada are no longer edge cases. They are recurring events.

When those events happen, they don’t just damage poles and lines. They take down the communications infrastructure that utilities depend on to see their grid, dispatch their crews, and restore service.

The consequences are real: loss of SCADA visibility, delayed restoration because field teams can’t coordinate, and workers operating in degraded conditions without reliable communications.

As Frank Czulo, President of Network Innovations Canada, put it during a recent Electricity Canada webinar: “No one bearer is truly five-nines or truly resilient anymore, not due to failure on their part, but because climate change is bringing wildfires. Even fiber connectivity mounted on poles is now subject to being burnt.” The physical infrastructure we’ve long taken for granted is increasingly vulnerable.

Failover Is Not Resilience

Here’s where I think the industry has a significant misconception. Many utilities believe that if they have a primary network and a backup, cellular primary with satellite failover, they’ve solved the resilience problem. They haven’t. They’ve created an alternative. That’s not the same thing.

Failover means active-passive: one network is doing the work, the other is waiting. When the primary fails, there’s inherent downtime during the switchover. For broadcast video, that meant a frozen screen during the hockey game. For a utility running SCADA traffic, monitoring voltage, current, power consumption, on/off status of substations, it means a gap in grid visibility at exactly the moment you need it most.

What Dejero built is fundamentally different. Our Smart Blending Technology approach is active-active-active: all connections carrying traffic simultaneously. We break network traffic into smaller packets and monitor the quality of service of each packet across every connection, to the millisecond level of resolution. When network carriers start to degrade in an area, we shift traffic to a higher-quality path within milliseconds, not seconds, not minutes. Session persistence is maintained. The application on the other end doesn’t know anything has changed.

For SCADA networks, that matters enormously. You want real-time understanding of what your grid is doing, especially as it responds to dynamic energy demands. With more data centers coming online and drawing increasing power, the ability to allocate energy intelligently, ensuring hospitals and critical infrastructure receive just as much as those new AI facilities, depends on continuous, uninterrupted visibility.

Canada’s Connectivity Gap Is Real and Solvable

One of the realities I’ve come to appreciate working with utilities in the United States, and increasingly in Canada, is how much aging infrastructure is still in the ground. T1 and T3 connections that would have felt modern thirty years ago are still powering SCADA networks at remote substations. In a world where 10 megabits per second is considered slow, many of these sites are running on a fraction of that.

The traditional answer has been to trench fiber out to those sites. In Canada, that option is often impractical: six months of the year the ground is frozen, construction costs are significant, and the resulting infrastructure, fiber mounted on poles or buried in a shared conduit, still carries risk. As Frank noted bluntly: a redundant path that runs over the same fiber line, just a different core, doesn’t stop an excavator.

The alternative is a highly resilient multi-network solution that can be deployed overnight. LEO satellite constellations like Starlink and Eutelsat have expanded what’s possible in rural and remote areas dramatically. But, and this is important, LEO isn’t a silver bullet either. Those satellites are always in motion, and handoffs between satellites overhead create micro-outages that a pure failover architecture can’t mask. Smart Blending Technology addresses this. Even in a fixed location, the network is never truly static.

Plugging Into What You Already Have

One of the questions I hear most often is: how does this work with our existing SD-WAN infrastructure? The short answer is: very well, and in a way that actually delivers on SD-WAN’s original promise.

SD-WAN was designed to software-define which wide area network traffic travels over. The challenge has always been that it works best when the underlying connections are comparable, similar latency, similar jitter, similar reliability. In the wireless world, that’s never the case. Cellular performance fluctuates based on tower congestion, weather, even a large public gathering nearby. Satellite bandwidth ebbs and flows as they orbit overhead.

What Dejero does is smooth those variations. By blending multiple connections and delivering a more deterministic signal, we essentially give the SD-WAN device a more predictable, reliable input to work with, more like a patch cable than a wireless link. Many Dejero deployments plug directly into an existing SD-WAN network as a secondary or tertiary connection. We’re not asking anyone to rip and replace or adopt a new cyber-security standard. We’re simply making what’s already there work better.

Where to Start: Give Us Your Hardest Problem

Frank Czulo made a point during our webinar that stuck with me: “If you’re starting today, you’re probably late.” I’d add a nuance to that.

Late doesn’t mean you don’t start. It means start deliberately and start where the risk is highest.

The way I’d frame it: don’t start with the easiest site. Start with your hardest connectivity challenge. That’s usually where we provide the most value, the substation that’s been limping along on copper, the LMR tower that loses connectivity during storms, the service vehicle fleet operating in areas where cellular conditions shift unpredictably. Solving that problem builds the confidence, the operational familiarity, and the organizational case to expand from there.

The other principle I’d emphasize is outcome-first thinking. Too often in this industry, technology leads the conversation. Someone buys a LEO dish, installs it, and then discovers it doesn’t actually solve the workflow problem they had. The right approach is to define what capability you need, what your field crews need to do, what your SCADA network needs to see, what does “reliable” mean for that specific application, and then build the network architecture around that requirement.

The good news is that we’re in a better position today than ever before to solve these problems. As Frank put it: “We’re not bandwidth-limited. We’re resilience-limited.” The pipes exist. LEO, cellular, fiber, we can make them all swim together now. The question is whether your architecture is designed to take full advantage of them.

The Connectivity Layer Is Infrastructure Too

The grid requires redundancy. It requires diversity. It requires resilience. The communications layer that supports it needs to meet the same standard. A utility that has invested millions in grid modernization, SCADA, AMI, distribution automation, DER integration, cannot afford to have that investment undermined by a single network outage at the wrong moment.

At Dejero, we came to this market from broadcast video and public safety, where connectivity failure was never an option. That experience is what we’re bringing to the utilities sector, not as a theoretical capability, but as a proven one. We’re excited to be growing our presence in Canada’s electricity market alongside partners like Network Innovations, who bring the systems integration expertise and utility-sector depth to make these deployments work in practice.

The failover fallacy has been acceptable for a long time because the alternative felt complex and expensive. It doesn’t have to be. Start small. Start with your hardest problem. But start.