Some of the most influential leaders of the Canadian & International ICT industry will gather in Toronto, June 6-8, at The 2016 Canadian Telecom Summit.

No other event matches The 2016 Canadian Telecom Summit for the depth and breadth of topics covered and issues debated.

No other event presents a complete picture of current and expected trends & developments.

You will see why The Canadian Telecom Summit has become the only must-attend conference.

With more opportunities than ever to learn, network and do business, if you are involved with or impacted by Canadian telecommunications, broadcasting and information technology, you need to be at The 2015 Canadian Telecom Summit.

Join your colleagues for 3 days of spirited discussion and networking, including our Monday evening Cocktail Reception sponsored this year by Rogers.

Download the latest look at the complete conference brochure.

Register today for The 2016 Canadian Telecom Summit.

There is a tension between individual’s rights to privacy and our collective rights to security. Technology has enabled unprecedented challenges to both, which is why these areas will be among the key topics to be explored at The 2016 Canadian Telecom Summit taking place June 6-8 in Toronto.

Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, Daniel Therrien will be delivering a keynote address on Tuesdady, June 7. IT World’s Howard Solomon quoted him saying “It is no longer entirely clear who is processing our data and for what purposes – creating challenges for meaningful consent.” Do customers provide informed consent to how businesses are using their data? Do consumers have any idea how their personal information is being shared and correlated with other data points?

The Canadian Telecom Summit will also look at cyber security and defense against data threats. Nathan Shuchami, Check Point’s Head of Advanced Threat Prevention and Christine Gauthier, the head of Check Point Canada will speak on Monday June 6. A full panel on cyber security will take place on Tuesday, June 7, moderated by Scott Jones, the assistant deputy minister for IT security for Canada’s Communications Security Establishment. On Wednesday, June 8, the panel looking at Big data and Analytics will also include consideration of these aspects of the issue, aided by the participation by Pamela Snively, the Chief Data and Trust Officer for TELUS.

Have you registered yet?

Approving a business case for building fibre to the home (FTTH) isn’t a binary choice: yes or no. Some parts of a city are easy to justify; other parts are more challenging.

We have seen this with a number of new fibre builds. In Kansas City, Google says “You can only get Fiber if enough people in your fiberhood sign up.”

It is important to keep this in mind when considering the statement by Minister Navdeep Bains in rejecting Bell’s appeal of the CRTC’s wholesale decision on FTTH.

Recall that Bell and TELUS had plans for significant, multi-billion dollar FTTH investments in some of their largest cities, like Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto.

Each of these projects were in the order of $1B. That is a billion dollars for each of the cities. Keep in mind, that this isn’t a matter of making a decision and writing a single cheque to enable the buildout of fibre. Each block, each neighbourhood might be a different project, with different work teams, different authorizations to go ahead. To proceed, presumably the engineering groups will have to show a positive business case to justify spending money for each of these piece parts.

There will be areas or even specific buildings that have strong, solid positive business cases and other areas that are still positive, still in the black so to speak, but less solid, more like shades of grey, driven perhaps by higher costs per household, or perhaps softer demand for fibre-based services.

A business case looks at the potential revenues and balances that stream against the costs. That is basic engineering economics. The business cases with mandated fibre resale will look different from business cases without such a mandate. The capital investment for a neighbourhood may be constant, but the revenue and expense lines will be different. In densely populated areas, the overall business case for FTTH will likely remain positive, but will it cover the same geography? What happens to the fringe areas?

There can be little doubt that lower retail revenues will shrink the areas the areas that are solid black and make the business cases more challenging for more households. How many homes are in neighbourhoods that no longer have a sufficiently positive business case? In places like Ottawa, where the city boundaries include large areas of low population density, mandated wholesale access to fibre will most likely lead to fewer homes getting upgraded fibre facilities.

We still don’t know what the wholesale rate will be for independent ISPs to access telco fibre. As such, it may be premature to start reworking the business cases for these multi-billion dollar builds. It may be close to a year before those wholesale rates are set.

In his press release denying the Bell appeal, Minister Bains stated “we will continue to foster a strong investment environment for telecommunications services to keep Canada at the leading edge of the digital economy. We are encouraged by the many recent private sector announcements about investing in fibre in Canadian cities”.

Clearly, the Minister was thinking about the billions of dollars of fibre to the home construction announced last summer. How will the business plans change? What will be the impact on construction programs for fibre in some of Canada’s biggest cities?

These questions and more are certain to be explored and discussed at The 2016 Canadian Telecom Summit, taking place June 6-8 in Toronto. Have you registered yet?

A recent news item appears to contradict testimony given during the CRTC’s recent #TalkBroadband hearing that stated, “all Europeans will have basic access by 2013. That’s been accomplished.”

According to the BBC, “The government will not automatically roll out broadband to those areas of the UK that don’t yet have services, it has been confirmed.”

The article quotes a spokesperson from the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport stating “Our current plans will reach at least 95% of the UK, but we want everyone to have fast broadband so we are introducing a Universal Service Obligation to help make sure no-one is left behind.” The article says the government hopes to have its Universal Service Obligation in place by 2020.

I checked the text of the actual presentation [pdf] to ensure there wasn’t an error in the transcripts. The original CRTC hearing speaking notes stated:

Second, the Digital Agenda’s central aims are much more ambitious than those of the FCC or the CRTC:

1. all Europeans will have basic broadband by 2013;
2. all Europeans will have internet access above 30 Mbps by 2020;
3. at least half of European households will subscribe to internet connections above 100 Mbps by 2020.

How can all Europeans have basic broadband already if the UK government is saying that it could be 2020 before its universal service obligation can be fulfilled? Is the grass really so much greener elsewhere?

Despite what the CRTC was told, Canada’s broadband availability (99% – 96% at speeds of 5Mbps or higher) appears to be pretty good compared to the UK, despite the vastly different population densities and geographic challenges. Just last December, the UK government launched a satellite voucher program, to provide a higher speed option for up to 300,000 households that do not have access to internet speeds faster than 2 Mbps. Satellite is part of the solution even in the UK, a country that has almost double Canada’s population residing in a land mass less than 1/40 its size.

Policy making needs to be rooted in facts and it isn’t helpful to have incomplete evidence set before the Commission.

It is fair to say that all of us would like everyone to have access to broadband. But, there is a cost to deliver such services. The most important questions remain: how much of a subsidy is required, who should be eligible for that subsidy, and how do we pay for that subsidy.

Above all, as I have written many times before, affordable broadband isn’t just a rural issue.

Canadians benefit from some of the most advanced and efficient wireless and broadband Internet services in the world. Further, penetration and usage rates for newer wireless technologies like tablets, smartphones and LTE connections in Canada are among the highest for industrialized countries.

These are among the findings of The Montreal Economic Institute in the 2016 edition of its report on “The State of Competition in Canada’s Telecommunications Industry” [pdf, 5MB].

According to its authors, Martin Masse and Paul Beaudry, the publication of the report was motivated by the mistaken impression given by some observers that Canada’s telecommunications industry compares poorly with that of other jurisdictions.

The report attempts “to dispel the notion that Canadians pay uncompetitive prices for low quality services.”

It argues that government and CRTC interventions in the wireless and wireline sectors could lead to unintended consequences that might jeopardize investment and innovation.

The release is timely as parties prepare final written submissions for the CRTC’s Review of basic telecom services. The authors urge Ottawa to resist intervening in the broadband Internet sector as it has in the wireless sector.

Any CRTC attempt to declare broadband an “essential service” and to regulate and subsidize it would be a solution in search of a problem, as broadband is well on its way to becoming ubiquitous simply through the normal course of technology adoption.

The report charges that the CRTC’s wireline wholesale decision, under appeal to the Federal cabinet, ignores the lessons of Europe, “where two decades of network sharing regulations and an obsession with price competition has led to a decline in mobile revenues and underinvestment in network infrastructure.” The authors call for Cabinet to modify the CRTC’s decision, and in renewing a commitment to the 2006 Policy Direction, “remind the regulator that infrastructure deployment is key to Canada’s long-term economic prosperity and should be encouraged, rather than deterred.”

Interventionist policies aimed at helping smaller players gain market share can have harmful effects on innovation and weaken incentives to invest in and deploy new infrastructure.

The report concludes: “Canada already has dynamic and competitive markets in telecommunications, and there is no need for costly and counterproductive policies that merely promote artificial competition.”

In releasing the report, the authors endorse the Bell acquisition of MTS announced earlier this week.

These issues and much, much more will be explored at The 2016 Canadian Telecom Summit, taking place June 6-8 in Toronto. Have you registered yet?