Fourteen years ago, I wrote a little piece called “From Intelligent to Irrelevant Networks,” which looked at how transport networks had universally delivered high quality, making the choice of long haul connectivity provider largely irrelevant; the most important distinction among service providers was among access providers.

How then would national and global carriers establish differentiation?

A new report from Citi Global Perspectives and Solutions was released last week, “Re-Birth Of Telecoms into a New Digital Industry: Time to Dump the Dumb Pipe” [pdf, 6.3MB].

While telecom operators have seen minimal industry growth of just 0%–3% in the past few years, sectors that use their networks such as Internet Services are seeing growth at rates at least six times higher.

So what’s a telecom operator to do? We believe they have two choices: (1) they can streamline their business and continue providing the ‘dumb pipe’ to the digital ecosystem, or (2) they can embark on a digital transformation.

In the report that follows, we investigate what a digital transformation would entail, how the future post-telecom era digital connectivity industry may shape up, and what it may mean for telecom investors.

The report is a good read for service providers and policy makers alike.

We have already started work on The 2017 Canadian Telecom Summit, taking place next year from June 5-7 in Toronto. Our theme for 2017 will be: “Competition, Investment and Innovation: Driving Canada’s Digital Future” and we will also be recognizing 25 years of communications competition in Canada.

A colleague suggested that it might be interesting to highlight ways that innovations originating in the communications sector have made a positive impact on our daily lives. So I have been going through various archives to research some of the inventions that have come out of the labs of service providers and suppliers. Starting November 1, my Twitter feed will highlight one each day leading up to the conference, with a #CTS17 hashtag.

I will also collect them in Storify. As I was pulling together some of the innovations, I noticed that there were major anniversaries or milestones in the past few weeks, such as last week’s 60th anniversary of the first trans-Atlantic call over the TAT-1 submarine cable:

and the 20th anniversary of the release of RIM’s Inter@ctive Pager 900:

Today happens to be the 150th birthday of Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden, a pioneer of radio communications. So, the Storify board is already open and I will try to keep it updated as I post the daily innovations beginning November 1.

I welcome your suggestions on items to post over the next few months.

In addition, if you would like to get involved as a sponsor or speaker for The 2017 Canadian Telecom Summit, please reach out to me as well. Registrations for next year’s event will open November 1, when we launch the new website. In the meantime, please mark the dates in your calendar: June 5-7, 2017 in Toronto.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Sunday evening marks the start of Rosh Hashana, the beginning of the Jewish calendar year 5777. Our offices will be closed on Monday and Tuesday.

Rosh Hashana [literally, the “head” of the year], starts a 10 day period of personal reflection. It is very different from the kind of celebrations and partying that mark the transition from December 31 to January 1. The stentorian blast of a shofar [ram’s horn] triggers a period of personal and communal introspection, challenging us to examine the deeds of the past year while looking forward to improvement in the year ahead.

On the virtual pages of this blog, and in my Twitter feed, my intent has always been to explore issues from a different perspective than you might find in the traditional media, challenging you, the reader, to consider alternate points of view in order to continue to build a sustainable communications infrastructure for Canada to be a leader in a globally competitive digital economy.

The year ahead will bring continued changes to Canada’s communications sector, with more innovation, further investment in new technologies, and expanding the capacity and reach of broadband services, giving us much to discuss at The 2017 Canadian Telecom Summit (June 5-7).

It is my hope that the year 5777 will be marked by good health, by personal and professional growth and may it also be a year of peace for all of us.

שנה טובה ומתוקה

With more than 400 kilometres of fibre optic facilities, Lakeland Networks announced this morning that it is rolling out 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) fibre-based internet service to rural homes and businesses in Muskoka.

The municipally-owned company first launched 1 Gbps service to Muskoka businesses in 2014. Now, with the help of the Federal-Provincial Small Communities Fund, it has gone a step further, connecting residential customers in rural Muskoka with some of the highest Internet speeds available anywhere. Lakeland’s gigabit internet service offers unlimited downloading capabilities for less than $100 per month.

The $8.6 million project to extend Lakeland’s existing fibre network was made possible with $5.7 million from the Small Communities Fund. Since being selected for funding a year ago, Lakeland has managed to roll out another 100 kilometers of fibre optic to areas beyond the relatively major communities of Bracebridge and Huntsville, such as Port Sydney and parts of Utterson.

Lakeland Networks provides high-speed fibre internet, VoIP phone service, point-to-point networking for business Internet, and full service IT, local area network and VLAN extension solutions.

Lakeland Networks is a division of Lakeland Energy, a subsidiary of Lakeland Holding which is owned by 6 local municipalities: Bracebridge, Huntsville, Parry Sound, Burk’s Falls, Sundridge and Magnetawan. I became a director of Lakeland Holding in June of this year.

Lakeland has 400 kms of fibre, but thousands more kilometers need to be covered before gigabit service is available to its entire operating area. How will rural broadband expansion be funded?

My brother tells me that in law school, his litigation professor told the class that when a client says “it isn’t about the money; it’s about the principle,” that client is lying. It’s about the money.

That is important to keep in mind when so-called consumer groups like Open Media say that “zero-rating” is “unfair, and bad for innovation and free expression online.” Open Media claims the practice “makes websites they don’t like slower”.

No. That simply is not true.

Yet this false information was used to induce signatures on Open Media’s petition, which should raise questions about the validity of its statement that “approximately 39,371” people (of whom we have no idea how many are Canadians) “call upon the Commission to protect their interests through … banning zero-rating”

Zero-rating is a billing option. Nothing more.

Do certain bits of traffic get metered or not?

It has nothing to do with traffic management; it has nothing to do with blocking websites; it has nothing to do with restricting consumer access to internet content.

Yet all of these red flags are falsely being waved by Open Media in its comments to the CRTC regarding the practice:

…seemingly pro-consumer arguments that zero-rating proponents make are wrong, for a number of reasons. Some arguments involve conflating Internet access itself with the content that consumers choose to engage with after obtaining access. This then removes consumers’ freedom of choice and places that choice inappropriately with the ISP at the access level.

and

Zero rate data must not be acceptable in our country as it gives big telecom power to make websites they don’t like slower and more expensive to access.

Zero-rating isn’t about traffic management or slowing down traffic. It’s all about the money.

Should service providers have the flexibility to offer consumers pricing that differentiates their products?

There is a long history of mobile data services offering zero-rate plans, as I described in a blog post in February:

• In 2011, WIND Mobile bundled its WINDworld service into many of its dataplans, giving users access to Facebook Zero, news, weather updates & free ringtones;
• In 2013, Eastlink offered a Social add-on that offered unlimited Facebook, Twitter and BBM for a flat $10 monthly fee;
• In 2014, in the US, Sprint offered a $12 add-on to provide unlimited access to a customer’s choice of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest, or for $22, the customer could have all 4;
• The Mobilicity website still shows a $5 Light Data plan, giving unlimited access to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Google+, and LinkedIn, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ. Includes: Gmail, Hotmail and MS Exchange.

The logic behind Open Media’s position seems to be that the desire to offer zero-rating emanates from data caps; if the CRTC gets rid of data caps, then zero-rating has no meaningful purpose. Open Media actually says “both data caps and zero-rating appear to be symptoms of larger structural problems resulting from the highly concentrated nature of Canada’s telecommunications market, which may need more fundamental policies such as improved wholesale market rules and, ultimately, structural separation to resolve”, but those actions are clearly beyond the scope of the CRTC’s current process.

The CRTC proceeding, Examination of differential pricing practices related to Internet data plans, is being argued under the guise of lofty principles (net neutrality, consumer access to the content of their choice, ISP gatekeepers), but it really comes down to money. We already have regulatory safeguards in place to deal with any interference in all users having open access to the content of their choice.

So we can see the argument is about money. How much do we pay for mobile internet?

Removing data caps is a form of price regulation that limits consumer choice. Some service providers have plans available with unlimited data, others choose to monetize their networks through plans that charge different amounts of use. If all service providers are mandated to eliminate pricing of services based on tiers of usage, it eliminates options for consumers and results in increased prices being paid by people who are on lower tiers. Logically, some will find that the benefit of unlimited data just isn’t worth the increased price, and having no other option, will cancel their data plan altogether.

Flat rating access to certain applications by some service providers gives people additional choices in the market. Removing that choice results in no subscribers benefiting while others pay more or receive less.

Phrased positively, zero-rating delivers benefits to some consumers while it does not harm any others. Why would we want to reduce consumer choice?