Yesterday, US President Obama unveiled ConnectHome, a new initiative to bring Internet connections to low-income households, targeting students living in public and assisted housing.

A new analysis by the US Council of Economic Advisors shows a strong correlation between household income and internet use, a relationship that I discussed more than 4 years ago.

As the White House background paper says, students in low-income households risk a widening “homework-gap”:

While many middle-class U.S. students go home to Internet access, allowing them to do research, write papers, and communicate digitally with their teachers and other students, too many lower-income children go unplugged every afternoon when school ends. This “homework gap” runs the risk of widening the achievement gap, denying hardworking students the benefit of a technology-enriched education.

Industry Minister James Moore issued an update on its Digital Canada 150 “digital strategy” that still doesn’t address the need to increase adoption of digital technologies among Canada’s lowest income households.

As part of its submission to the CRTC’s “Review of basic telecommunications” proceeding, the Affordable Access Coalition has put forward an “Affordability proposal”, to “provide low-income Canadians with a monthly subsidy to use on the telecommunications service of their choice (broadband, home phone or cellphone service) and from the service provider of their choice.”

As Rogers has demonstrated with its Connected for Success program, the private sector in Canada can be a partner in delivering a solution for many low-income households. A story in the Globe and Mail indicated that Rogers is currently providing 7000 households in Toronto Community Housing with service for just $9.99 per month.

It is gratifying to see the issue brought forward by the Affordable Access coalition.

How will industry and government policy makers respond?

The Pew Research Center recently released a report that looked at 15 years of data collected to study internet adoption by Americans.

In the report, Pew explores some of the major demographic trends behind the adoption numbers and highlights:

• Age differences: Older adults have lagged behind younger adults in their adoption, but now a clear majority (58%) of senior citizens uses the internet.
• Class differences: Those with college educations are more likely than those who do not have high school diplomas to use the internet. Similarly, those who live in households earning more than $75,000 are more likely to be internet users than those living in households earning less than $30,000. Still, the class-related gaps have shrunk dramatically in 15 years as the most pronounced growth has come among those in lower-income households and those with lower levels of educational attainment.
• Racial and ethnic differences: African-Americans and Hispanics have been somewhat less likely than whites or English-speaking Asian-Americans to be internet users, but the gaps have narrowed. Today, 78% of blacks and 81% of Hispanics use the internet, compared with 85% of whites and 97% of English-speaking Asian Americans.
• Community differences: Those who live in rural areas are less likely than those in the suburbs and urban areas to use the internet. Still, 78% of rural residents are online.

You should read the report [or download the 13-page pdf].

Can lessons learned south of the border be extrapolated to Canada?

With reductions in data collection by Statistics Canada, are policy makers at the CRTC or Industry Canada concerned about access to similar information for Canadians?

A couple interesting articles are worth highlighting:

• In the Edmonton Sun, Graham Hicks wrote a piece that quoted me: “TELUS fibre-optic Internet in Edmonton really is the second coming“
• Cisco issued a press release about its new Internet of Things System

The TELUS fibre to the home story is a follow-up on the company’s announcement a week ago about a $1B investment to rewire the city of Edmonton. A few days later, Bell announced plans to bring FTTH to Toronto and there was a follow-up story about potential plans for TELUS to expand its program to Calgary.

Cisco’s press release talks about a six-pillar approach for its IoT System:

1. Network Connectivity
2. Fog Computing
3. Security
4. Data Analytics
5. Management and Automation
6. Application Enablement Platform

Many of these areas were part of the panel and keynote discussions at The 2015 Canadian Telecom Summit by various companies. But Fog Computing is an area that hasn’t had as much coverage. Cisco describes it as:

‘Fog’ is a distributed computing infrastructure for the Internet of Things (IoT) which extends computing capability – and thereby data analytics applications – to the ‘edge’ of networks. It enables customers to analyze and manage data locally, and thereby to derive immediate insights from connections. Cisco predicts that 40% of IoT-created data will be processed in the fog by 2018.

The evolution of the network, including orders of magnitude shifts in the number of things being connected, will impact so many aspects of our businesses and our communities.

The Cisco press release resonated with me as I thought more about the telephone companies’ fibre expansion plans.

Which communities and which industries will adapt first to take advantage of the array of platforms that enable a digital economy?

Be sure to listen to talks by some of the industry leaders who spoke at The 2015 Canadian Telecom Summit. What themes provided an inspiration for you?

A few of the sessions from The 2015 Canadian Telecom Summit are now available for viewing on demand:

• The “Regulatory Blockbuster” panel can be found on CPAC
• The keynote address by Juniper CEO Rami Rahim [‘Closing the Innovation Gap Through Automation‘] is available on YouTube
• The keynote address by GENBAND CEO David Walsh is available on YouTube
• The “Internet of Things: Hyperconnectivity” panel is available on YouTube
• The “Coming to Any Screen Near You: The video revolution” panel is available on YouTube
• The closing keynote address by Dr. Kellie Leitch is available on YouTube

Your comments, as always, are welcomed.

An upgrade is long overdue.

For about 20 years, mhgoldberg.com and the associated blog have been hosted on a platform that is outdated and capacity limited.

My web presence was originally hosted by my friend John Epstein at Passport Online, but Passport was acquired by Magma which was acquired by Primus which rolled it into BlackIron Data and then sold this to Rogers Data Centres.

All the while, with a few hiccoughs here and there, the systems have been humming along. You have noticed (or hopefully haven’t noticed) when there are problems coaxing the old platform along.

Spam engines (really, anti-spam engines) have been “upgraded” in the past, but I have received notice that there will be a system migration over the next few weeks. The new platform promises to have more capacity, faster response times and most importantly, greater reliability.

To limit complications that can arise, I will be limiting updates and changes to the sites until after the migration in mid-July.

I hope you will stay tuned – and keep following me on Twitter in the meantime.