In an unusual display of unanimity, cable companies and telcos alike asked the CRTC not to publish aggregated market forecast data. The CRTC is gathering the company specific data as part of the information for its fresh look at the Local Forbearance Decision.

The arguments put forward by the carriers are varied, but include our concerns that the CRTC failed to ask a bunch of service providers for their information and many who were asked haven’t bothered responding. Other concerns include data inconsistencies (some carriers have December 31 year ends, others use August 31; some carriers refuse to submit forecasts beyond those years approved by their boards), securities disclosure concerns, ability for the public to derive company specific information, etc.

Beyond voyeuristic pleasure, each carrier challenged whether a purpose is being served by disclosing the information. The CRTC should let carriers keep their private information private.

For aggregate market information, people know to call my partner in The Canadian Telecom Summit: Michael Sone. Happy Birthday, Michael!

Nortel is starting to see carriers looking at expanding their long haul optical capacity. After years of dealing with the glut of capacity creating during the boom years of the tech bubble, carriers are talking about needing to invest in optical equipment again, according to Nortel CTO John Roese. Will Nortel be the supplier of choice? I suspect Lucent / Alcatel will try to get in their way.

Roese and Nortel President Mike Zafirovsky were speaking at a gathering of Ottawa technology executives at a joint OCRI / ITAC breakfast meeting on Thursday.

According to the Ottawa Business Journal story about the breakfast, the two Nortel execs detailed three trends that offer Nortel an opportunity to take the industry lead:

• hyperconnectivity: where individual consumers are always plugged into the Internet with enabled devices;
• network-aware applications: where network applications are easily tailored to needs;
• true broadband: defined as a seamless handoff to provides uninterrupted mobility between home, office and points between over high-speed networks.

Keep in mind, this list mixes applications and underlying technologies. Consumers are not likely to care about hyperconnectivity or true broadband. These are considerations of what goes on behind the curtain to enable sizzling applications – as yet undefined.

Will Nortel be able to seize on these opportunities? Will Nortel’s customers be able to convince consumers to buy their solutions?

Mark Evans’ All Nortel, All the Time has more on news out of the breakfast.

I am heading to a meeting at University of Toronto this morning – part of my activities on the advisory board of the Masters of Engineering in Telecom. It is somewhat appropriate to keep alive last week’s thread of stimulating excellence in our schools.

My son is taking an interesting course this year that looks at poetry and mathematics. It is an unusual combination.

His math professor, Peter Taylor, seeks to inspire excellence. He believes we need to go way beyond repetitive arithmetic exercises found in our text books. In reviewing his writings, he argues that our traditional system of teaching math is failing our kids.

A few years ago, Professor Taylor wrote an article that is worth a fresh look. He noticed that high school English exams had a level of sophistication that was not found in the routine arithmetic that is characteristic of high school mathematics.

No mathematician I know would read any part of the Grade 12 text book for intellectual or spiritual pleasure. I don’t know how that statement strikes you but it strikes me as scandalous.

It seems to me that we need more professors like Peter Taylor, combining poetry and math, to transform the math and science curriculum in our schools. We need enhanced support of science centres, such as TELUS‘ gifts in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Montreal. We also need to get right into the schools, school boards and ministries of education.

We need to inspire an innovation generation.