Back home again

Despite a difference in temperature of more than 20 degrees, it’s good to be back home.

Sure, I could get used to the weather in Israel. They call winter the “rainy season”, but keep some perspective as to what they are comparing: it simply does not rain, drizzle or think of precipitation between April and September.

And when the winter precipitation falls, you don’t have to shovel it.

I have always liked to eat local when I travel. The food scene in Israel is fabulous. Local fruit and vegetables are available year-round and there are still distribution networks to have field ripened produce delivered to corner markets daily.

It’s a Mediterranean country, so many of my favourite fish dishes are fresh from the sea. For kosher eaters like me, there are choices that are unparalleled. This led me to frequently digress on my Twitter feed, showcasing my dietary feed.

So, thank you to my Twitter followers who have indulged me for the past 4 weeks while I over-indulged myself.

Back to telecom.

We used Canadian carrier roaming for one of our lines and used a local SIM for the other (easier for people to call a local phone number).

As I have written before, Israel’s low mobile prices come with a high cost: compared to Canada, the networks are awful. Coverage is weak in many areas, even in urban centres and most of the time, our phones were operating in 3G, periodically transitioning to 4G. Even then, the connection delivered painfully slow data speeds. According to Ookla Speed test, Israel ranked 69th in the world for median Mobile speed in October (29.6 Mbps down) compared to Canada which was ranked two and a half times faster at 74.49 Mbps. Neither of our lines even came close to the Ookla medians, even though we were usually in Israel’s 3rd largest city.

There has to be a middle ground for mobile and telecom policy, encouraging investment in coverage and deployment of advanced infrastructure, while applying measures to ensure universal affordability.

It is surprising (and perhaps somewhat disappointing) that various levels of government in Canada have not done more to explore targeted affordability measures for telecom services based on income. Notably, I distinguish between the popularity of generally lower prices – we all want to pay less for everything – contrasted with why I would consider to be real affordability, the inability to buy a product or service that one requires to participate in today’s environment.

No matter how low average prices fall, there will be disadvantaged segments that cannot afford even the most basic, entry level services. We need to find a solution.

Government funding programs have targeted geography without regard to income. The federal government’s 25% reduction in general mobile prices did little to improve genuine affordability for lower income Canadians. In both of these instances, one can see the political benefit of the program, but I am not convinced these approaches have delivered sufficient benefits for those who need the most help.

The industry stepped up on its own to create affordability programs for fixed broadband. There is still much more work to be done to address digital literacy and other issues that impede adoption of new technologies.

Perhaps the coming year will see the government look at funding a targeted mobile affordability initiative, and develop programs to study and address non-price related factors.

It’s good to be back.

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