Six years ago today, my daughter moved overseas. She got married, has kids… and Air Canada is doing quite well from our frequent travel back and forth.
In between visits, we talk by phone, frequently a few times a day, using video apps or just ordinary phone calls. Sometimes it’s just for me to keep one of the kids company while he eats a snack.
Long distance wasn’t always like that.
I remember Sunday afternoon phone calls to my grandfather in New Brunswick. We would gather around the kitchen phone, handing it off from one sibling to the next to say a quick hello. It would take about an hour’s work to earn enough to pay for a 10-minute call. Statistics Canada shows the average telephone had less than one long distance call per week. When I went to school, we would wait until we saw the start of the news at night before making a call home; the cheap rates started at 11 pm.
Overseas calls were prohibitively expensive in those days, in the order of an hour’s pay per minute. Nobody that I knew would pick up the phone to make an overseas call just to say “hi”.
And now, it isn’t anything special when one of my kids is driving 100 kmph on a highway in Alberta, talking to his sister on a train 9 time zones away. My long distance bill last month was 44 cents.
When I moved back to Canada in 1989, it was to help drive those changes, introducing network-based competition to the telecommunications industry. This coming June, we will mark the 25th anniversary of the CRTC’s approval of our application, launching what it called “Consumer Friendly Competition.” [The cover for the CRTC’s media package featured stylish, designed in Canada, Northern Telecom Contempra phones.]
It marked the end of an era of fathers shouting to their kids to hurry up and get the phone: “it’s long distance!”
I smile when I think of the part I had to play in creating the framework that enables the innovations we have seen over the past quarter century. I continue to be excited by the opportunities over the next 25 years. What will be my kids’ nostalgic anecdotes that cause their kids to roll their eyes, thinking “here we go again with that old story”?
The 2017 Canadian Telecom Summit [June 5-7, Toronto] will look at “Competition, Investment and Innovation: Driving Canada’s Digital Future.” For the past two months, each day I have been tweeting an innovation that came from the telecom sector [collected here].
What innovations will drive Canada’s digital future? I hope you’ll be part of the discussions at The 2017 Canadian Telecom Summit.
Early Bird savings for conference registrations are in effect until the end of February. Register now and save.