On Monday, I caught an interesting comment from CRTC chair JP Blais in his exchange with the witnesses from the Competition Bureau appearing at the Commission’s wholesale wireline oral proceeding.

The Chair had just paraphrased the witnesses’ perspective as “I was struck by your presentation this morning to say, well, wait until we have the evidence” when he continued [at line 105 of the transcript], saying:

I have always thought that the role of the Commission is more to be a doctor that analyzes an issue and prescribes a course of conduct if there is an illness rather than a coroner when it’s too late.

Is there sufficient evidence that there is an illness that warrants a prescription?

Planning is now well underway for The 2015 Canadian Telecom Summit. The event will take place June 1-3 in Toronto and we have already confirmed a number of sponsors and speakers.

The Canadian Telecom Summit is Canada’s leading information and communications industry event; this will be our 14^th annual gathering of the leading stakeholders.

For three full days, The Canadian Telecom Summit delivers thought provoking presentations from the prime movers of the industry. The Canadian Telecom Summit gives you the chance to hear from and talk with them in both a structured atmosphere of frank discussion and high octane idea exchange and schmooze in a more relaxed social setting of genial conversation.

This year’s event will explore Hyper Connectivity: Shaping Personal & Business Digital Relationships. In-depth panels will examine

• Cyber Security: Perils, protection and the role of ICT
• Big Data & Analytics: Managing and exploiting a treasure trove of information
• Competition in Telecom
• The Regulatory Blockbuster
• Customer Experience Management
• Mobile Commerce: The future of banking and shopping in Canada’s digital economy
• The Internet of Things: Hyper connectivity
• Turbo-charging network performance: Achieving quantum improvements in service

We look forward to hearing from you with other suggestions for the program.

The registration system is open and available. To help manage your 2014 budget – or if you are looking for a year-end motivator for your top employees – you can pay on-line and receive a receipt right away.

Be sure to mark the dates on your calendar: June 1-3, 2015.

Register now and save.

Three years ago, when the CRTC ruled against Bell with respect to exclusive mobile access to NHL/NFL programming, then Chair Konrad von Finckenstein said:

Canadians shouldn’t be forced to subscribe to a wireless service from a specific company to access their favourite content. Healthy and fair competition between service providers will promote greater choice for Canadians.

As I wrote at the time, I disagreed with the decision – and I continue to think that the CRTC got it wrong.

I disagree with the concept that all carriers offering the same content promotes “greater choice for Canadians.” Exclusives create increased opportunities for differentiation, with not all carriers carrying the same content. If one carrier has such compelling content that it causes customers to switch service providers, then the other service providers will have to step up their game and find other ways to win those customers back.

We aren’t talking about essential services like access to emergency calling. It is an entertainment service.

Let’s fast-forward to today. Following a $5.2B investment in rights to NHL broadcasting, Rogers has launched a number of multi-platform delivery services, enabling a number of options for Canadian consumers to access more hockey games than ever before.

The games themselves are available to all Canadians, whether or not they subscribe to Rogers access services – cable, internet or mobile. Some capabilities, such as the GameCentre app, are available for a fee to all Canadians, although Rogers customers have free access until the end of the year; other capabilities, such as GamePlus (additional camera angles, statistics, analysis, etc), are exclusively available to Rogers customers.

Bell says that exclusive access to GamePlus constitutes a violation of sections 3 and 5 of the CRTC’s New Media Exemption Order.

3. The undertaking does not give an undue preference to any person, including itself, or subject any person to an undue disadvantage. In any proceeding before the Commission, the burden of establishing that any preference or disadvantage is not undue is on the party that gives the preference or subjects the person to the disadvantage.

5. Subject to paragraph 6, the undertaking does not offer television programming on an exclusive or otherwise preferential basis in a manner that is dependent on the subscription to a specific mobile or retail Internet access service.

Interestingly, in Bell’s application, it left out the first part of Section 5 in its quotation – that little bit about the exclusivity prohibition being “subject to paragraph 6”. We will see how relevant that exemption becomes.

Among the questions to be explored will be whether GamePlus is television programming. What is “television programming”? The Exemption Order defines it as “programming designed primarily for conventional television, specialty, pay or video-on-demand services.” Can you get those GamePlus capabilities on your TV set or were they designed primarily for some other form of delivery, like, say, a mobile app?

To what extent is Bell’s application more of a case of seeking clarification of the restrictions inherent in the 2011 NFL decision? Is Bell trying to determine the conditions under which an integrated carrier can lock up Canadian rights to an NFL version of GamePlus?

That may be one of the reasons that TELUS has joined in the fray, urging “the Commission to put a swift end to content exclusives”.

TELUS believes that the Commission should take immediate steps to establish a new clear and unequivocal prohibition of exclusives relating to online content where the content is owned or controlled by Canada’s large vertically integrated communications companies. The Commission must ensure that Canadians don’t have to subscribe to multiple networks in order to access all the content they want.

It was TELUS – the largest service provider in Canada with no content broadcasting assets – that launched the original complaint that led to the CRTC’s 2011 NFL decision.

TELUS says in its comments this week that Rogers is “using the coveted NHL rights to drive subscriptions to its network access services.”

I doubt there is any argument about that point.

The question to be resolved by the CRTC is whether a regulatory response is needed. If the CRTC rules that Rogers is entitled to package GamePlus as it wants, how will the marketplace respond? Will it drive lower prices, improved service and increased innovation by other service providers?

Will those responses serve the interests of consumers?

Ericsson has released its latest Mobility Report [pdf], providing a wealth of analysis and insights into current communications traffic and market trends.

As one of the leading mobile infrastructure providers, Ericsson has performed in-depth data traffic measurements since the earliest days of mobile broadband, leveraging its large base of live networks in all regions of the world.

The need for more spectrum and increased mobile investment is being driven by continued growth in mobile data traffic, in the order of 60% year-over-year.

Globally, there are 6.9B mobile subscriptions, 2.5B of which are mobile broadband, meaning that there is now 95% penetration – 19 mobile subscriptions for every 20 people on the planet. Ericsson acknowledged that in some cases, the count includes inactive subscriptions

Ericsson expects 800M smartphone subscriptions to be added by the time 2014 is done. They believe there will be 2.7B smartphone subscriptions in total by year end.

In the 3rd quarter, 65% of all phones sold were smartphones. This is one of the factors driving data growth. Ericsson finds that mobile phones are actually generating twice the traffic of PCs, tablets and routers. Globally, the average data usage per subscription is just under 1GB (900MB). Ericsson expects this to grow to 3.5GB per subscription by 2020.

Video is already the largest and fastest growing application on mobile networks. Devices are evolving with larger screens, enabling higher picture quality, resulting in more video being consumed on all types of devices and in higher quantities, at home and on the move. Ericsson expects video to continue to grow – by an order of magnitude by the year 2020 – to represent 55% of all mobile data traffic.

The Mobility Report talks about 5G in terms of Embracing a Network Society. It sets a vision for new capabilities and requirements. For example, as machines become networked, Ericsson sets an expectation for some devices to be equipped with batteries that could need to last 10 years. Although there will be tremendous growth in machine-to-machine connections, perhaps representing 50% of devices on the mobile network, Ericsson expects machine traffic to be very small – in the order of 0.1% of total traffic.

For the first time, Ericsson has released a North American regional appendix [pdf]. Ericsson says that 90% of North American households have at least 3 internet connected devices; 99% of US households have at least one connected device; 97% of US households have at least one mobile phone. [The US has a lifeline program that targets low income households.] The report shows that Canada’s LTE networks are delivering almost twice the speeds compared to US LTE networks, although increased demand led to slight performance declines in both markets. Continuing to invest in spectrum and “densification” is expected to provide relief.

Ericsson is working with MIT to examine mobile usage patters, overlaid with census data to provide interesting insights in demographics. There are a couple of pages in the report that show the kinds of information that can be gleaned by examining time-of-day mobile traffic, supplementing census data and empowering urban planning.

This is the seventh issue of the Ericsson Mobility Report, which shares forecast data, analysis and insight into traffic, subscriptions, and consumer behavior to provide insight into current traffic and market trends. Ericsson created a Traffic Exploration Tool to customize analysis using data from the report, filtering by region, subscription, technology, traffic, and device type.

Ericsson regularly performs traffic measurements in over 100 live networks in all major regions of the world. The Ericsson Mobility Report and Traffic Exploration Tool are valuable reference works, with information relevant for global and national research.

What differences drive the North American mobile market? How well are carriers responding to demand? Does Canada’s communications policy anticipate the needs being forecast?

For years, I have been writing about Canada’s well intentioned but misguided efforts to legislate against the scourge of spam.

Five and a half years ago, in 2009 I wrote about the potential for the legislation “to inadvertently chill some beneficial forms of electronic commerce communications.”

It isn’t that I like getting spam; or getting junk mail. The problem is that the Act seems to be banning electronic communications that would be completely legitimate in paper form. I’m not crazy about door-to-door sales people either, but we need to be careful about restricting communications in a democratic society. Instead, we can teach ourselves how to slam the door politely. And once in a while, we actually open our wallets and purchase something, due to an unsolicited communication, whether it was in person, on paper or transmitted electronically.

A year later, in 2010 I wrote that I was somewhat surprised with the response to the Act by people who normally stand up for civil liberties.

Typically, we see internet communications as being less restrictive than traditional media. We have so many people that talk about open access to information and actively promote it. I see so many cases of civil libertarians up in arms over attempts to block digital communications – even in cases where hard copies are stopped at the border or seized by police.

So it is somewhat satisfying to read on Barry Sookman’s blog that a new paper by Emir Crowne from University of Windsor’s Faculty of Law and Stephanie Provato says “the Act may not survive constitutional scrutiny as it unduly restricts freedom of speech.”