For more than two decades, much of the telecom policy conversation has revolved around a challenge: closing the digital divide. We’ve debated broadband targets, technology toolkits, rural funding models, affordability programs, and spectrum policy — all with the goal of ensuring that every Canadian can get online.

To be clear, that work isn’t finished. But, as access improves and connectivity becomes nearly ubiquitous, a new divide is emerging. The next digital divide isn’t about who is connected. It’s about how we use the time we are connected. How our attention is being shaped, fragmented, and monetized.

The new divide won’t be solved with fibre builds, radio spectrum, satellites or subsidy programs. It can’t be solved by money being thrown at engineering and construction.

In the early 2000s, the internet was a scarce resource: limited speeds, limited coverage, limited devices. The policy challenge was straightforward: if we build more, we will connect more and deliver more.

Scarcity has flipped. Connectivity is now abundant. We have choices of technologies, choices of service providers, choices of speeds.

Attention is the scarce resource. Every platform, app, and service is competing for the same finite cognitive resource. Unlike bandwidth, attention can’t be expanded. It can only be redistributed — often in ways that can leave users overwhelmed, distracted, or exhausted.

There is a growing body of evidence challenging the wisdom of pushing kids and schools toward being online all the time. A couple weeks ago, in my post “The bedroom problem”, I referenced testimony in front of the US Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, showing stagnation or decline in literacy, numeracy, problem solving, creativity, and general cognitive performance among adolescents, correlated with classroom environments undergoing digital transformation. A recent article in The Sunday Times looks at how reading test scores fell in Sweden, coincident with the country’s move to screen-based learning.

Earlier this week, an article on Fortune was entitled “The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents”. The author says “Rather than empowering the generation with access to more knowledge, the technology had the opposite effect.”

These results have implications for policymakers, telecom service providers, and families.

Service providers traditionally defined their role around access: build the network, deliver the service, keep it reliable. But as the recent Rogers screen‑time study showed, families are increasingly concerned not just with how much connectivity they have, but what that connectivity enables. Parents aren’t asking for faster speeds. That study suggests they’re asking for help managing digital life.

That’s a fundamentally different expectation — one the industry needs to explore.

When nearly half of youth smartphone use happens in bedrooms, the network is no longer just a pipe. It’s an environment that influences habits, sleep, socialization, and wellbeing. Is the public redefining digital responsibility?

Historically, the idea behind “the stupid network” was that communications services providers were responsible for connectivity, and platforms were responsible for content. Users were responsible for their own behaviour online. Those boundaries have always been blurry.

The emerging digital divide is no longer between those who have broadband and those who don’t. It’s between those who can manage digital distractions and those who are overwhelmed by them. It is a next level form of digital literacy: consider it to be “Graduate level” digital literacy.

Which families will be left to navigate the attention economy alone? It is a divide much harder to measure than download speeds, but its impacts — on mental health, productivity, education, and civic engagement — may be far greater.

Is this a role for communications services providers? Connectivity providers are not the same as content companies. They don’t design algorithms, or curate feeds, but they build and operate the infrastructure upon which it all rides.

So what is reasonable to expect? Will the sector evolve from focusing on more speed, and more data to lead development of enriched digital experiences, with healthier digital habits?

Which service providers will offer tools, like usage dashboards, with time‑of‑day insights, and device‑level breakdowns? The tools would need to be simple optional controls to help households set their own boundaries.

This isn’t about paternalism. It’s about acknowledging that connectivity now shapes users’ cognitive environments, and those users need support navigating these environments.

If the first digital divide required infrastructure investment, the next one will require interdisciplinary thinking: Public health; Education; Technology and User interface design; Privacy; Consumer protection.

The original digital divide was about access. The next one is about attention. While communications services providers didn’t create the attention divide, the sector is being pulled into the conversation about how to manage it.

The service provider sector may not need to own this issue, but it will need to be part of its solution space — whether by choice or by expectation.

There is a national consultation underway to develop Canada’s AI strategy. A few weeks ago, a summary of the submissions was released.

Canada’s AI capabilities are having a moment, but not what we might necessarily brag about. For years, we’ve celebrated an AI research pedigree while quietly ignoring the infrastructure gap beneath it. A recent Policy Options article by Joe Rowsell frames the issue clearly: Canada is talent‑rich but compute‑poor.

That’s more than just an inconvenient detail for the tech sector; we might ask if it could be a national strategic vulnerability.

Rowsell describes a reality that many in the telecom and digital infrastructure space have seen coming: Canadian researchers routinely ship their workloads — and often their data — to American‑based hyperscale facilities because domestic compute capacity isn’t there.

In other words, we may have built a world‑class AI research ecosystem, but it is riding on top of others’ servers.

More than a question of performance, it raises questions about sovereignty. When the computational infrastructure is outside our borders, so is operational control. And, when AI begins to underpin the operation of critical infrastructure — energy, communications, transportation, health — control matters.

The paper highlights another tension: AI’s global energy appetite is exploding. Servers optimized for AI workloads can consume ten times the electricity of conventional machines, and global demand could rival Japan’s power consumption by 2030.

That’s a major electric grid planning problem.

Canada is in a better position than most countries to solve it. More than 80% of Canada’s electricity is considered non-emitting, powered primarily by hydro and nuclear, and supplemented by solar and wind. Canada’s climate naturally reduces cooling loads. These are significant structural advantages over the US and Europe, if we build on them.

Rowsell proposes a framework built on three pillars:

• Sustainable-by-design: Build data centres that start efficient rather than retrofit later.
• Sovereign-by-design: Keep Canadian data, models, and operational control inside Canadian infrastructure.
• Responsible-by-design: Bake governance, safety, and Indigenous data sovereignty into the architecture itself.

A compelling argument in the article is for AI to be a grid asset, not simply an “energy hog”. With carbon aware scheduling, and waste‑heat capture, data centres can actually strengthen the grid rather than strain it.

From a telecom perspective, this conversation is overdue. AI workloads will reshape network demand patterns, data‑centre siting, spectrum planning, and cloud‑edge architectures. If Canada wants sovereign AI, it will need sovereign transport, sovereign interconnect, and sovereign cloud.

Compute without connectivity is useless. Connectivity without compute is a missed opportunity.

These lines stuck with me: “AI will not run out of code or chips, but it will run out of clean electrons. Electrons are the new currency of intelligence, and unlike most of the world, Canada’s supply is clean.”

Rowsell ends with a warning: Canada’s clean‑energy advantage won’t last forever. Other countries are racing to decarbonize their grids and scale their compute. Canada has those clean electrons — now. If we don’t move quickly, we could lose this significant structural advantage.

Earlier this week, an editorial in the Globe and Mail warned us to “Pay attention to what’s behind the AI curtain”.

The loudest proselytizers for artificial intelligence like to present the technology as inevitable. That may be so. However, we all need to be sensible enough not to fall for tech-bro bravado. Exaggerating what AI has actually achieved cannot be a way to convince people that this future has already arrived.

When the government released its summary of submissions, Michael Geist wrote a review, “What the Government Isn’t Saying About the Results of its AI Consultation“. He found the Government’s official summary softened some of the expert panel’s key messages. “The experts are trying to sound the alarm on the risks to Canada if it fails to act but that isn’t the message the government seemingly wants to communicate.” The summary of submissions may be less of “What We Heard”, and more like “What We Wanted to Hear”.

Canada’s AI research capabilities and talent are well known. Will we move quickly enough to build the necessary infrastructure to retain that talent at home.

Buried inside the recent Rogers’ screen‑time report is a statistic that merits more attention: 46% of youth smartphone use happens in the bedroom.

Not kitchens. Not living rooms. Not shared family spaces.

Bedrooms.

This single data point should drive a serious conversation about youth screen time, with implications well beyond parenting.

Last month, the United States Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee heard testimony from experts on the impact of screen time on children and young adults. Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told the Committee that Generation Z – those born roughly between 1997 and 2012 – is the first generation to underperform across every cognitive measure. [pdf, 631 KB]

His testimony showed stagnation or decline in literacy, numeracy, problem solving, creativity, and general cognitive performance among adolescents, correlated with classroom environments undergoing digital transformation.

Over half of our children now use a computer at school for one to four hours each day, and a full quarter spend more than four hours on screens during a typical seven-hour school day. Unfortunately, studies suggest that less than half of this time is spent actually learning, with students off-task for up to 38 minutes of every hour when on classroom devices.

Dr. Cooney Horvath isn’t calling for us to eliminate technology for our kids in schools and at home. “It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works.” How do we protect children’s developmental needs? How do we balance technology and innovation with an objective to “maximize the cognitive capacity and long-term flourishing of the next generation”?

Moving from school to home, note that the Rogers study didn’t set out to highlight the shift to the bedroom, but the data demonstrates an interesting phenomenon. Private space connectivity is becoming the default. For years, we’ve talked about “the connected home”; with higher resolution, we can see “the connected bedroom” emerging.

A few forces have converged to make this inevitable: Smartphones are personal, portable, and always on; Wi‑Fi coverage in homes has improved dramatically; Social life for teens increasingly happens online — and privately; Bedrooms are the only space in the house where youths can feel fully autonomous.

The result is a shift from shared digital spaces to private digital ecosystems. If nearly half of youth screen time happens behind closed doors, then coverage, speed, latency, and device prioritization will all be part of the family dynamic. Parents may not articulate it this way, but Wifi performance and the connecting network can shape intra-household behaviour.

Further, bedroom usage complicates parental screen‑time management. Device‑level controls are relatively easy for teens to bypass, app‑level controls can be inconsistent (if available at all), platform‑level controls vary wildly. This is precisely why parents are looking to telcos for help. A teen spending two hours on a phone in the living room is a different scenario than six hours alone in a bedroom. Once a teen is in their room with a smartphone or tablet and a strong wireless signal, parental negotiations become psychological, not technical.

The Rogers Screen Break data hints at this: higher screen time correlates with lower sense of belonging and lower levels of physical activity. Location may be part of that story. If the bedroom is the new digital hub, telcos may need to rethink how home WiFi systems are marketed, how parental controls are structured, how usage dashboards visualize where time is spent, and whether room‑based profiles need to become a feature.

This isn’t necessarily a matter of surveillance. How can service providers give families visibility into patterns they currently can’t see? Youths are using their devices in private spaces because that’s where their social lives, entertainment, and autonomy reside. The question is not how to reverse this trend — it’s how to help families navigate it.

For service providers, this is an opportunity to evolve from being the invisible utility in the background to a partner in managing the modern connected home, or bedroom.

As legislators examine the effects of apps and technology on youth education and social development, parental tools will be an important part of the conversation.

Last night, in his analysis of BCE’s 2025 financial results, Maher Yaghi of Scotiabank asked a question that should be carefully considered in boardrooms of Canadian carriers, and cause serious concerns for national policy makers and regulators: “Why continue to heavily invest in infrastructure?”

Given regulatory prerogatives why continue to heavily invest in infrastructure?
In an environment where 1) the regulator forces operators to rent their infrastructure to competitors both on the wireline and wireless sides at rates set by the same regulator and not on a commercial basis as seen in the US, 2) any investment in network technology made by an operator provides the same advantage to its competitors, and 3) given the high leverage of companies like Rogers, BCE and TELUS, wouldn’t it make more sense for incumbents to materially reduce capex to levels closer to challengers like Quebecor? Obviously this was not the choice made by either BCE nor Rogers when setting their capex guidelines for 2026, but we believe it is a fair question to ask in the current Canadian regulatory context.

All Canadians should ask how the current telecom policy environment could have Scotiabank questioning carriers plans to continue to invest in infrastructure.

Contrast this with Prime Minister Carney’s Budget release: “We’re ushering in a new economic strategy to supercharge growth and give businesses the confidence to invest.”

When Prime Minister Carney launched the new Major Projects Office to fast-track nation-building projects, Energy Minister Hodgson said “At this pivotal moment, we must embrace new ways of doing business in order to build the strongest Canada. We are making good on our promise to move quickly to unlock private sector investment, provide investor certainty…”

There seems to be a serious disconnect.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote “Communications companies are ready to invest billions of dollars of capital, and have the expertise to deploy technologies that power the digital economy.”

At that time, I also wrote that we need regulatory clarity. Not necessarily deregulation. Not necessarily lighter regulation. Just faster, smarter, more predictable regulation.

Through the years, more than 500 of my blog posts have talked about investment. Five and a half years ago, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry clearly stated that “Canada’s future depends on connectivity”, rejecting a CRTC wholesale rate decision because the Government was “concerned that these rates may undermine investment in high-quality networks.”

Policy makers should be very concerned that the current regulatory framework leads Scotiabank to suggest that it makes more sense for Canada’s biggest telecom carriers to materially reduce capital expenditures.

In a digital economy, isn’t investment in telecom infrastructure among the most important nation-building projects?

Resilience is a popular policy buzzword, but those of us who have designed, built and operated truly resilient digital infrastructure know that we need more than just slogans. I last wrote about network resilience in November, pointing to the need for proactive planning and coordination across all branches of government.

A recent white paper by Georg Serentschy [pdf, 500KB] extends the description of the coordination problem. Networks, data centres, cloud platforms, subsea cables, satellites, and the software layers that bind them together form a single, interdependent system whose resilience determines economic stability, national security, and social continuity.

The global risk environment is intensifying. Climate‑driven disasters, cyberattacks, supply‑chain fragility, and geopolitical events are converging in ways that expose the weaknesses of siloed regulatory models. Canada has already experienced climate‑related outages, ransomware incidents, software failures, and supply‑chain constraints, yet its policy frameworks still treat telecom, cloud, and critical infrastructure as separate domains. The Serentschy paper argues for a systemic approach: resilience must be engineered across the entire lifecycle of digital infrastructure, from design and investment to operation and recovery.

Internationally, regulation is moving toward risk‑based, proportional frameworks such as NIS2 and CER directives in the EU, or sector specific frameworks in the US, such as NIST CSF. These models expand the definition of critical infrastructure, require structured risk assessments, and impose clear reporting and mitigation obligations. Canada currently has no equivalent, and the gap is becoming more visible as digital interdependencies deepen.

Geopolitics is reshaping connectivity at a pace Canada cannot ignore. The EU is pursuing digital sovereignty and industrial autonomy. Hyperscalers and LEO satellite operators have become geopolitical actors in their own right, influencing routing, redundancy, and chokepoints. For a country relying heavily on foreign cloud providers and satellite systems — especially in the North — this creates strategic dependencies that require deliberate policy choices.

The paper’s treatment of digital sovereignty is particularly relevant for Canada. Sovereignty is not autarky; it is controlled interdependence. It means reducing critical dependencies, maintaining regulatory autonomy, and building trusted partnerships while still benefiting from global collaboration. Canada has begun moving in this direction, but without a coherent national doctrine, decisions appear to be reactive and fragmented.

Serentschy stresses the need for measurement, a theme frequently discussed in a number of recent Ivey workshops. Resilience cannot be managed without metrics, yet Canada lacks standardized indicators for restoration times, route diversity, supplier concentration, or dependency on foreign cloud infrastructure. As Serentschy posits, “To be governable, resilience must be measurable.”

The white paper ultimately calls for a shift from resilience rhetoric to resilience engineering. For Canada, we need to understand what that means. Do we have the right regulatory, policy and inter-departmental government frameworks? Are we examining the need for public‑private collaboration? Should we be integrating climate adaptation into network planning? Is digital infrastructure to be treated as a unified ecosystem or a collection of sectors?

Is there an opportunity to learn from the EU and US before the next major outage or geopolitical shock forces action? Digital infrastructure is a strategic asset. To increase the resilience of Canada’s digital infrastructure, all branches of government will need to be involved.