For 3 days, More than 60 leaders who shape Canada’s ICT industry will speak at The 2020 Canadian Telecom Summit, June 15-17 in Toronto. The event will include over a dozen keynote addresses offering insights into the future of Canadian ICT, examining the services, technologies, consumer & business trends and regulatory & policy initiatives that drive the information economy.

With so much public attention focused on telecommunications & broadcast issues, no other event is quite like The 2020 Canadian Telecom Summit in covering the industry from every angle.

Now in its 19th year, The Canadian Telecom Summit is Canada’s most important annual ICT event, attracting attendees from around the world.

The Canadian Telecom Summit delivers thought provoking presentations from the prime movers of the industry. This is your chance to hear from and talk with them in both a structured atmosphere of frank discussion and high-octane idea exchange and network in a more relaxed social setting of genial conversation.

After being immersed in a full program of keynotes and panel discussions, plan to attend our not-to-be-missed Cocktail Reception. This is a chance to unwind, enjoy some delicious food & drink, catch up with colleagues and make new professional acquaintances.

Come meet with leaders from services and equipment suppliers, applications developers, policy makers, regulators and major customers.

The Canadian Telecom Summit is the only event you need to attend. Mark the dates in your calendar: June 15-17, 2020. Registrations are open – book your place today!

Special Networking Events: All participants are invited to join us for our annual cocktail reception Monday evening, June 15.

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Continuing Professional Development: Time spent attending substantive sessions at The Canadian Telecom Summit can be claimed as “Substantive Hours” toward the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Continuing Professional Development (CPD) requirements.

Too many are confusing ‘affordability’ with a desire to pay lower prices. Don’t we all want lower prices for everything we buy?

In reality, millions of Canadians are finding mobile data plans that they can afford, as evidenced by Rogers third quarter 2019 financial results. More than a million subscribers signed up for its unlimited data plans, “adopting these ‘no more overage’ plans at three times the pace anticipated”. More than 100,000 net new customers, despite an increase in churn.

Rogers indicated that “Approximately 60% of our existing customers that have migrated to these plans have upgraded to higher price plans.” It is an interesting data point. Clearly, those customers have found that the new plans are delivering much better value, with far more data for just a little more money.

Rogers’ financial results provide evidence that most Canadians are finding mobile plans to be affordable. While we all want to pay less, at the same time, we need to ensure our policies preserve incentives for investment in network expansion for capacity and coverage, maintaining leadership in the delivery of advanced speeds and services.

We should be exploring more creative approaches that deal with the small minority of Canadians who cannot afford the mobile devices and service plans they need to participate in the economy. I have often written about the need to understand all of the factors that have inhibited universal adoption of broadband and mobile services, such as in “Understanding the digital divide”. In “Do we know what we don’t know?”, I asked, “Is Canada doing enough research to explore the nature of its digital divide?”

The price of connectivity is just one of the elements. How can we find solutions for a problem that we may not fully understand?

I have also written frequently about the challenges associated with producing international price comparisons for telecommunications services. Each year, Innovation, Science and Economic Development produces a mobile price comparison study [2018 study | pdf | 1.35MB], examining trends in prices in Canada and how those prices compare to selected trading partners. The annual study looks at 6 baskets of services for mobile:

• Level 1: 150 voice minutes;
• Level 2: 450 voice minutes and 300 SMS (texts);
• Level 3: 1,200 voice minutes, 300 texts and 1 GB of data usage per month;
• Level 4: unlimited nationwide talk and text along with 2 GB of data;
• Level 5: unlimited nationwide talk and text along with 5 GB of data; and
• Level 6: Shared plan with 3 phones lines and unlimited nationwide talk and text along with 10 to 49 GB of data.

A problem arises when those baskets are no longer representative of the types of services that people are buying. For example, the average price for a level 4 plan from 2018’s study was $75.44 which included just 2GB of data. New ‘unlimited’ plans are available from most carriers for less than that price, with at least 5 times the full speed data. However, these new popular plans with no overage charges simply don’t fit into any of the survey’s arbitrary baskets.

As Statistics Canada writes about its updates to the Consumer Price Index, “If the fixed-quantity basket of goods and services was kept unchanged for an extensive period of time, it would gradually lose accuracy and relevance as a reflection of consumer spending.” The report continues, “New products and services are introduced to the market and existing ones may be modified or become obsolete. As a result, the basket needs to be revised periodically to reflect changes in consumers’ spending patterns.”

Over time, we have seen significant changes to consumers’ spending patterns for mobile equipment and services. Regulatory changes have led to a restructuring of device subsidies for many plans; new unlimited plans have caught on faster than anticipated. How will these get captured meaningfully in the annual study?

Consumers were promised lower telecommunications prices as part of the political campaign. Will the government’s annual price comparison study accurately “reflect changes in consumers’ spending patterns” and show that mobile plan prices are already much lower than last year?

One of the jobs I had in the early days of my corporate career was in a Budget and Results organization. This was before the days of personal computers on every desk, before the days of smart phones or personal mobile phones. We had armies of clerical staff tabulating numbers on adding machines and new paper tape calculators, typing up monthly reports and responding to executive inquiries.

Many of those inquiries would be generated on Friday afternoons, around 12:30 with a response due by 8:00 am on Monday. Often, the answer would then be tracked for months, creating yet another tab in the monthly results package. I learned early on that the source of many of these Friday inquiries was an innocent lunchtime comment by a Vice President, who would join his AVPs each Friday at the Ridout for a weekly ‘leadership meeting’ fueled by 25 cent glasses of Labatts Blue on tap. As an aside, in those days, one would order drinks at the Ridout by the table, and it didn’t really matter what was in the glass: beer; soft drinks; or, juice. The tavern was directly across the river from the original Labatts brewery. Blue was assumed to be the order when you asked for a ‘table’.

So, Bert would scratch his head, say something like “I wonder… you know, I just sometimes wonder… ” and he would blurt out some stream of consciousness thought, that might have otherwise been kept to himself, had he not just finished his second glass of inspiration. My AVP would chime in saying “that is a really good thought, Bert. I think I saw a report on that recently.” He would then find an excuse to slip away from the table, work his way to the payphone by the men’s room and call us in order to generate a report to have on Bert’s desk first thing Monday morning. Most of the time, Bert really didn’t care – he was just making conversation.

We learned early on that some of these ideas didn’t merit disruption of everyone’s weekend plans. Once we advised the AVP of the cost of responding to his Friday lunch phone calls, he was no longer as eager to leverage each Friday lunch comment as an opportunity to impress the boss.

Why did I think of this story?

An article by The Logic in the National Post brought this anecdote to mind: “Canada Infrastructure Bank explored launching public utility to compete with Rogers, Bell & Telus”. The Post says “The report argues that a public utility would be more efficient for building rural infrastructure than paying private companies to do so.”

That summary should have been the indication that this was an idea that should be buried. Otherwise, the line on the chart that said “The most basic policy question is should telecommunications infrastructure be a regulated public utility based on open access infrastructure.”

That isn’t a question anymore. The question of treating telecommunications infrastructure as a regulated public utility has been answered numerous times, examined by independent regulators around the world (including Canada’s) and various expert bodies, such as the 2006 report of the Telecom Policy Review Panel [pdf, 1.6 MB]. I have written about this numerous times, such as in “Should Canada create a telco crown?” from August, 2013, and “Governments can’t run networks” from July, 2010.

As I wrote last week, the land down under has shown what can go wrong when governments take on the job of building a public utility broadband network: “Learning from Australia”.

Canada Infrastructure Bank may have explored launching a public utility network, but hopefully, it gave the idea the attention it deserved, before laughing it off and moving on to consider whose turn it was to order the next table full of draft.

Bronwyn Howell authored an important commentary in Cartt.ca with “Lessons from Australia’s national network mess.” Based on observations about Australia’s broadband and mobile markets, she warns that politicizing Canadian telecommunications regulation is a bad idea.

Australia appears to be a simple counter example to Canada, with similar population density and geographic challenges. However, the political interventionism in Australia’s mobile and internet markets should serve more as a cautionary tale than a gold standard.

Like her recent piece on the AEIdeas blog, “Upping the political ante in mobile markets: A cautionary tale from Canada” (the subject of my post “A cautionary tale of political interference“), Dr. Howell warns that we should be concerned when “politicians usurp the role of regulators and start making matters of regulatory purview the subject of election campaigns.”

Advanced communications infrastructure is too important to be abandoned to the vagaries and short-term agendas of the political process. Australia’s failed NBN experiment is stark reminder, for Canadians, of how expensive this trade off can be.

Paul Burbank at Faskens wrote an article (see: “Calling All Voters – Be Wary of Wireless Promises this Election Season”) that sums up the election hype over mobile prices: “Affordability has become a central theme in this campaign and cheaper wireless makes for great politics. But great politics doesn’t always translate to great policy.”

Last week, the European Commission released a coordinated risk assessment [pdf, 1.7 MB] on cybersecurity in 5G networks.

As stated in the accompanying press release:

The report is based on the results of the national cybersecurity risk assessments by all EU Member States. It identifies the main threats and threats actors, the most sensitive assets, the main vulnerabilities (including technical ones and other types of vulnerabilities) and a number of strategic risks.

According to the report, the roll-out of 5G networks is expected to have the following effects:

• An increased exposure to attacks and more potential entry points for attackers: With 5G networks increasingly based on software, risks related to major security flaws, such as those deriving from poor software development processes within suppliers are gaining in importance. They could also make it easier for threat actors to maliciously insert backdoors into products and make them harder to detect.
• Due to new characteristics of the 5G network architecture and new functionalities, certain pieces of network equipment or functions are becoming more sensitive, such as base stations or key technical management functions of the networks.
• An increased exposure to risks related to the reliance of mobile network operators on suppliers. This will also lead to a higher number of attacks paths that might be exploited by threat actors and increase the potential severity of the impact of such attacks. Among the various potential actors, non-EU States or State-backed are considered as the most serious ones and the most likely to target 5G networks.
• In this context of increased exposure to attacks facilitated by suppliers, the risk profile of individual suppliers will become particularly important, including the likelihood of the supplier being subject to interference from a non-EU country.
• Increased risks from major dependencies on suppliers: a major dependency on a single supplier increases the exposure to a potential supply interruption, resulting for instance from a commercial failure, and its consequences. It also aggravates the potential impact of weaknesses or vulnerabilities, and of their possible exploitation by threat actors, in particular where the dependency concerns a supplier presenting a high degree of risk.
• Threats to availability and integrity of networks will become major security concerns: in addition to confidentiality and privacy threats, with 5G networks expected to become the backbone of many critical IT applications, the integrity and availability of those networks will become major national security concerns and a major security challenge from an EU perspective.

[emphasis in original document]

The European Commission says, “these challenges create a new security paradigm, making it necessary to reassess the current policy and security framework applicable to the sector and its ecosystem and essential for Member states to take the necessary mitigating measures.”

The EU has set a target of December 31, 2019 to develop a “toolbox” of these “mitigating measures”.

If there are strategies to be developed to mitigate security risks associated with the next generation of networks, we need to first develop an understanding of the types and sources of potential threats. To date, much attention has been directed to a single hardware supplier, but the EU observed that “The deployment of 5G networks is taking place in a complex global cybersecurity threat landscape.” It isn’t so simple a matter of banning or approving suppliers of network gear based on the location of corporate headquarters.

The EU seems to have a more sophisticated analytic approach, understanding that there are numerous challenges with global supply chains and a number of strategies available to mitigate those risks.

As the EU has found, the challenges of 5G architectures create a new security paradigm. We should be working to understand the security framework required for the entire 5G ecosystem in order to prepare appropriate mitigating measures.