Will lower cost connections get more people online?

That is the objective of a number of initiatives being offered by telecom companies across the country. Programs provide devices and services to disadvantaged individuals and families.

Long time readers of this blog will recall that Rogers launched its Connected for Success internet program, the first-of-its-kind program in Canada in 2013 in Toronto. The company expanded the program to subsidized tenants and members of housing partners across the Rogers internet footprint in Ontario, New Brunswick and Newfoundland. In 2021, Rogers added new speed options and TV bundles to meet customers’ evolving needs and expanded eligibility to make the program available to more low-income Canadians. Over the past year, the program expanded across Western Canada and Northern Ontario; a new national Connected for Success wireless 5G program was launched.

Rogers offers an array of services branded under Connected for Success. According to Rogers, Connected for Success is available for over 2.5 million eligible recipients of Provincial income support, Provincial disability benefits, Rent-geared-to-income tenants of a non-profit housing partner organization, Seniors receiving the federal Guaranteed Income Supplement, or the Resettlement Assistance Program. In addition, households receiving the Maximum Canada Child Benefit and Maximum Guaranteed Income Supplement are eligible through the federal Connecting Families program described below.

• Rogers Connected for Success 5G mobile plan features: Access to 5G/5G+ network; 3GB (at speeds up to 256 Mbps). Data at reduced speeds thereafter;
  Unlimited Canada-wide talk and text; Unlimited international texting and picture/video messaging from Canada; U.S. & International Preferred Rate included; Call Display with Name Display; Voicemail; Call Waiting and group calling; Access to Roam Like Home; 2,500 Call Forwarding Minutes; and, Spam Call Detect. Customers can also get a no-cost 5G smartphone with financing as long as they keep this mobile plan for 24 months. (Customers can bring their own 5G-enabled device if preferred.)

TELUS offers a portfolio of services branded under“Connecting For Good”:

• Mobility for Good: Mobility for Good for youth provides a free smartphone and plan to youth aging out of foster care, helping them successfully transition to independence. Mobility for Good for seniors provides access to a discounted smartphone and low-cost mobility rate plan for Canadian seniors receiving a Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) amount of $6,500 or more annually, ensuring that they stay connected to loved ones and can access important resources and information.
• Internet for Good: TELUS Internet for Good offers low-cost, high-speed Internet to qualified low-income families and seniors, youth aging out of care and people with disabilities in need.
• Tech for Good: Available nationwide, Tech for Good helps improve quality of life, independence and personal empowerment of people with disabilities by offering customized recommendations and training on assistive technology for mobile devices, computers and laptops.
• Health for Good: TELUS Health for Good initiatives like mobile health clinics and free or low-cost access to TELUS Health MyCare™ counselling and TELUS Health Medical Alert services make healthcare more accessible for marginalized individuals who often face significant barriers accessing quality health care.

Nationally, lower cost connections are available to eligible low income households, branded under the federal government’s Connecting Families Initiative. This program is overseen by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED). The costs are covered by various Internet Service Providers across Canada.

There are 2 plans offered under Connecting Families.

• Plan 1: $10 per month which includes: Up to 10 Mbps download speed; 1 Mbps upload speed; 100 GB of data.
• Plan 2: $20 per month which includes: Up to 50 Mbps download speed; 10 Mbps upload speed; 200 GB of data.

There are Connecting Families service providers nearly everywhere in Canada: Access Communications Co-operative; Beanfield Technologies; Bell Canada (including Bell Aliant and Bell MTS); Cogeco; Coopérative de câblodistribution de l’arrière-pays (CCAP); Hay Communications; Mornington; NorthwestTel; Novus Entertainment; Quadro; Rogers; Rural Net; SaskTel; Tbaytel; TELUS; Vidéotron; and, Westman Media Cooperative.

There are still too many Canadians who aren’t online despite all of these options for lower cost connections for internet and mobile services and devices. As we have discussed before, there are non-price factors inhibiting people from connecting to broadband services.

Alberta recently launched a free digital literacy training program, available in English and French, with 19 courses divided between Basic and Intermediate streams. I’ll have more about this in the coming weeks.

What more do we need to do to get more people online?

Do people have a BS blindspot? How many people think they are better at detecting misinformation than in reality?

Canadian psychologists, Shane Littrell (University of Toronto) and Jonathan Fugelsang (University of Waterloo) have been examining misinformation for a number of years. Last year, their paper in Thinking and Reasoning revealed a somewhat dangerous paradox. It seems the more confident we are in being able to distinguish between truth and misinformation, the more likely we are to be susceptible to false information: what they call the BS blindspot. Not only do the people worst at detecting misinformation think their abilities exceed reality, they also think they are better than most.

As I have been writing over the past few months (December’s “Creating more sophisticated content consumers”, and January’s “Dealing With disinformation”), we need to understand how to counter misinformation.

Littrell and Fuselsang have a new study released in Applied Cognitive Psychology [pdf, 4 MB] found “that asking people to reflect on why they find certain statements meaningful helps reduce receptivity to some types of misinformation but not others.”

It seems that much depends on the source of the information. The researchers found that claims from perceived experts can be largely immune to the kinds of interventions relying on reflective thinking.

In Illuminating human bias and our ability to be misled, Waterloo quotes Professor Fugelsang endorsing a long-term digital literacy strategy. “We need to teach misinformation awareness, healthy skepticism and encouraging reflective thinking early on in life — as early as elementary school.”

Is reflection the best medicine to treat an epidemic of misinformation? It depends. But, Littrell and Fugelsang suggest a reflective pause for anyone encountering information related to health, finance or politics, especially online.

We need to become more sophisticated consumers of content and information, to see past the BS blindspot. It needs to be considered a key component of improving our overall digital literacy.

Are today’s home connections approaching fast enough for broadband? That was the subject of a late November post of mine in the context of an FCC review of the US broadband standard. In 2020, I wrote a similarly entitled post, challenging the myth that universal fibre should be on national agendas.

According to Deloitte’s 2024 TMT Predictions, “In some parts of the world, some consumers may have all the bandwidth they need in 2024.”

Deloitte predicts the most commonly used applications (audio and video streaming, video calling, gaming, and home security) will not see any increase in the recommended bitrates. Indeed, Deloitte suggests that some applications may loosen bitrate requirements thanks to improvements in compression technologies.

The implication is that consumers may be reaching a ceiling for the speed of their residential broadband connections.

For 40 years, those of us who were online at home sought faster connections. I remember dialling into Bell Labs with my Hayes 1200 modem. I marvelled as my AT&T Unix PC painted the green screen so much faster than my old 300 baud acoustic coupler.

Deloitte predicts that consumers may focus less on headline broadband speeds and look more at factors such as reliability, bundles, indoor networks, or just plain value.

That said, consumer demand for higher speeds is only part of what drives network infrastructure needs for broadband providers. Globally, there are governmental incentive programs and regulatory requirements aimed at eliminating the digital divide with minimum speed requirements. These range from as little as 10 megabits per second (Mbps) to 1 gigabit per second download speeds, so providers should build networks with these speeds to receive funds or comply with mandates. Next, there are competitive pressures in the market: If one provider is advertising ultrafast speeds, others may need to match or at least come close. Further, building network infrastructure is often an investment with a 20 year plus horizon, so there is an element of futureproofing.

Still, Deloitte observes that the technologies being deployed today are “more reliable, more sustainable, easier to provision, cheaper to operate, and have lower latency.” As such, carriers will continue to deploy fiber to the home and DOCSIS 4, upgrading existing facilities and expanding to unserved areas.

So are we approaching fast enough for broadband yet? Deloitte says that 100 Mbps is more than enough for a household with 2 people; the firm suggests that fewer than 1% of households in most markets might need over 300 Mbps.

By the end of 2022, CRTC data says 93% of Canadians (including 67% of rural Canadians) had access to 50/10 Mbps speeds with unlimited downloads. 87% of Canadians have access to 100 Mbps service (at year end 2021, the latest published data point). On a weighted average basis, the CRTC says Canadians subscribe to 331 Mbps (2022).

Does that mean the need for investment is complete? Hardly. There’s more work needed to upgrade certain areas, and to extend networks to unserved communities.

To what extent will consumers look at factors beyond headline speeds when buying broadband services?

Can light touch regulation benefit consumers? In today’s competitive telecom world, a new paper answers that question, “yes”.

In my 2024 agenda post, I noted how CRTC’s determinations on mandated wholesale access can actually lead to reduced competition by negatively impacting the business case for certain marginal investments. That will lead to reduced coverage for enhanced broadband and advanced wireless services.

CTIA, the US wireless industry association recently released a report that looked at a paper by Georgetown University professor John Mayo: “The Evolution of Consumer Welfare in the Mobile Wireless Service Industry” [pdf, 517 KB]. As CTIA notes, the paper “offers a systematic assessment of the evolution of competition in the wireless industry and how it drives consumer welfare, concluding that the decades of light-touch regulation of mobile broadband provided the framework for substantial gains to consumers.”

… virtually every dimension of economic performance within the wireless telecommunications sector reveals that the light-touch regulatory approach that has governed the industry for decades has created a business-government framework that has generated nothing short of massive gains to consumer welfare in the United States.
…
[The light touch] policy framework has not only produced consumer welfare benefits for today’s customers, but has also resulted in a robust feedback loop in which firms, in competitive efforts to retain existing customers and attract new customers, are driven to constantly invest in next-generation network technologies that produce a steady stream of new innovations. These innovations, in turn, create new consumer welfare benefits for tomorrow’s wireless customers.

The FCC in the US is considering the application of more heavy-handed regulation for its wireline and wireless telecommunications services industries under its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for reclassifying broadband internet service [pdf, 2.2MB].

In Canada, there seems to be a never ending regulatory process to establish a broadband regulatory framework. Further, the government has sent mixed messages with Policy Directions, and Ministerial letters to the CRTC, challenging regulatory independence. As I wrote last week, the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology plans to “undertake a study on the modernization of the regulatory framework and the convergence of wired and wireless products to ensure that future decisions are informed by robust data and recommendations for the benefit of all consumers in terms of accessibility and affordability”.

What will this mean for the climate for investment in telecommunications infrastructure?

In May of 2021, I wrote about a report that demonstrated that Canadian consumers put a value on quality, and will migrate between service providers based on their mobile network experience.

Consumer welfare isn’t just about price. Will we consider how light touch regulation can bring longer term, more holistic benefits to consumers?

In a post I wrote last October, I asked if we sometimes lose sight of the target. That post referred to a post called “Regulators Regulate”.

Both are worth a fresh look. Should the test for effective regulation be creating an environment that enables and encourages improved consumer welfare?

We all want reliable and resilient networks. Telecom policy makers, regulators, network planners, service provider executives, customers (large and small), all of us want our communications networks to be available – always. So why aren’t they?

Over the past 4 years, with so many of us working for home, there is an even greater dependence on our voice and data networks. Working from home, schoolwork and classes online, streaming video for entertainment, gaming hand health applications all mean that degradations in data communications are effectively the same as being out-of-service. We have come to expect perfection from our networks, even as competitive pressures drive down prices for service, despite inflationary pressures in the rest of the economy.

How do service providers increase network resilience to meet consumer expectations? When I wrote about the subject last April, I observed, “With all the best preparations in the world, networks will still sometimes go down.” I noted the CRTC’s own storm-related system failure from a week earlier. A year and a half ago, I pointed out that the Rogers network failure of 2022 wasn’t even the biggest network outage that week – KDDI had 40 million customers off the air for 3 days. And just two months ago, Australia’s Optus disrupted service to 10 million customers for 12 hours.

Networks sometimes go down.

In the olden days, defined as the BC era (before competition), telecom rates were regulated in a way that provided monopoly service providers with an opportunity to earn a reasonable rate of return on their investments. Since those rates were tied to capital spending, the Canadian regulator held annual Construction Program Reviews, looking at various categories of planned capital spending, which were tied to various categories of spending and a wide range of service objectives. In this way, the regulator was able to set measurable service standards, and review the levels of capital investment to meet those objectives. The outcome of the review would usually be that the CRTC found the program plans to be reasonable.

Those days are long gone. The overwhelming majority of revenues for most service providers are from unregulated rates. The majority of capital spending is “at-risk” investment, tied to success in the marketplace.

Before the holidays, I noticed a December survey released by a UK-based consumer advisory site. That survey found that 1 in 3 UK households experienced a broadband outage of some kind in the previous 12 months. When asked how many service interruptions exceed 3 hours, the average number of incidents was 33.

It is a remarkably high level of service disruption, but the December results represent an significant improvement over a similar survey conducted 3 months earlier.

Networks will still sometimes go down and weather-related service disruptions will likely be a bigger factor in the coming years.

In a competitive environment, what is the role of regulators in setting standards or objectives for reliable and resilient networks?