Month: January 2009

International data roaming rates can vary considerably.

I travelled over the winter break and found that my charges from one country were 5 times the rate per kilobyte that I was charged for US roaming. Obviously, the US is the number one location that most Canadians visit.

Fortunately, I found free WiFi available in many locales to keep my bills down.

No kvetching at my carriers here.

Unlike Alec Saunders and his experience last fall, I’m not looking for business-as-usual roaming practices when I cross political borders. Let’s face it, with options such as WiFi on so many devices, mobile data roaming is a pretty discretionary service. Ask what the rate is before you travel if you think the amounts are going to be material to your willingness to pay.

I can vouch for Alec’s reference to Rebelsim as an alternative to getting your devices. I tested one out while I was on the road over the holidays. It successfully unlocked a number of devices that had been locked to a few different carriers.

Later this week, I’m heading to Israel for a few days. Israel is a country with among the world’s highest penetration rates for mobile services and I have arranged for a local phone SIM for voice calls while I am visiting. I will let my Canadian Blackberry do its thing, taking the roaming charges as they may come. Low cost / free WiFi is widely available.

Bottom line: do some research into roaming rates before getting on the plane or turn off the radio on your mobile device if you don’t want surprises when you get home.

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Last week, I had a posting about the filing of interrogatory responses in the CRTC’s network management proceeding.

Christopher Parsons, a doctoral student in Political Science at University of Victoria, responded to my call for a volunteer to tabulate the responses. He has generously made them available for download from his website [ pdf, 406KB].

Late in the day today, the Union des consommateurs filed an application with the CRTC for some of the confidential information to be disclosed to the public record. PIAC is also seeking release of some of the information that Bell and Rogers filed confidentially. The Commission is scheduled to rule on these applications next week.

We will have a special session looking at net neutrality issues at The 2009 Canadian Telecom Summit, taking place in June in Toronto. Special early bird registration rates are available until the end of February.

Last week, I received a call from some guy purporting to be calling from “Provincial Police Magazine.”

Of course, the caller ID displayed Unknown Name / Unknown Number. The caller wanted to know if he could count on my support of their efforts to help save the 30,000 missing children each year.

Now, of course I wouldn’t want to be the guy who stands in the way of saving 30,000 children. But I wanted to know why a magazine that I have never heard of ignored my number being on the Do Not Call List (DNCL). Asking the caller that question triggered him to disconnect.

I’m glad he hit the red button first. Since he hung up on me, I feel less guilty about not saving all those children.

Provincial Police Magazine has no web presence, and is likely just another scam.

Last Wednesday, Global National ran a piece talking about how easy it is for the bad guys to continue to operate and even use the DNCL as a source of numbers. It is what we have been saying from the beginning.

Will the DNCL ever actually result in a prosecution? Don’t blame the CRTC. They were ordered to implement the DNCL by Parliament. Will this piece of legislation do anything more than raise the cost of doing business for legitimate groups while letting the bad guys go free?

Academic research project: has anyone developed a macro cost / benefit analysis of the DNCL?

[Side note: I had a response to my suggestion last week for a student project. Thank you, Christopher.]

Momentum may be building in public support for digital infrastructure to play a significant role in the government’s economic stimulus plans to be released in the January 27 budget.

As the Globe and Mail writes:

The most “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects, such as most of those in the list that the Federation of Canadian Municipalities released on Wednesday, tend to be the least forward-looking. The projects that predominate in the federal budget’s stimulus package, however, should represent real advances in the real economy. Canada needs to deploy the opportunity of the financial crisis to promote technological change, though the basics of public capital should not be neglected.

A companion news story has similar messages.

Infrastructure usually involves bridges and roads and now the Harper government is expected to expand that definition to include high-speed Internet access for everyone in the country in its coming budget.

Sounds similar to what we wrote earlier in the week and indeed, what we have been saying ever since our opening remarks at The Canadian Telecom Summit in June. We’ll continue to monitor this file.

Last Friday, I wrote about investment in telecom infrastructure and I included a reference to a chart that I prepared a number of years ago that looked at the amount of capital sucked out of global wireless carriers in the year 2000 by (mainly European) 3G spectrum auctions.

Former CRTC vice-chair Richard French sent me a copy of a paper called “Governance and game theory: When do franchise auctions induce firms to overbid?” that has been accepted for publication later this year in Telecommunications Policy.

Rick’s paper argues that overbidding, especially in the German and British auctions in 2000 aggravated the tech collapse which led to a loss of value by the successful bidders.

Canonical auction theory states that bidders make valuations of objects to be auctioned and bid rationally in the light of their valuations. In the case of spectrum auctions, this means that bidders make business plans and bid up to their minimum return on investment. In the ideal auction, they will bid away supranormal profits (economic rents) to the benefit of the public treasury.

While auction theory accounts for the possibility of a winner’s curse, in which the winning bidder is the one which overestimates the value of the auctioned object the most, it fails to account for a case in which not only the winning bidder(s), but also the last losing bidder, so grossly overvalue the object.

Rick suggests that in a small minority of cases, this kind of overbidding can be anticipated and should be planned for.

By the way, Rick tells me that he does not believe that Canada’s AWS auction was a case of overbidding.

Write Rick for a copy of the paper.