For 3 days, June 16-18, the leadership of the telecom, broadcast & IT industries will converge at the Toronto Congress Centre to discuss the key issues and trends that will impact this critical sector of the economy. Join 500 of your peers, partners, suppliers, policy makers, regulators, customers and competitors in attending telecom’s most important gathering.

Now in its 13th year, The Canadian Telecom Summit has become the place for Canada’s ICT leaders to meet, interact and do business. As in past years, this year’s event will feature high-octane interaction, top-level keynote speakers and thought-provoking panel discussions. Plan to join us.

Future-proofing our place in a digital world: As connectivity expands to include billions of devices and machines in our homes and businesses, how does Canada stake out a leading position in an increasingly digital world? How do our networks and our industry need to change?

The 2014 Canadian Telecom Summit‘s keynote speakers and panelists will address these points, giving you a chance to hear about service deployment, what is in store for next generation business models, and underlying all of this, the technologies that continue to drive the industry forward.

The Canadian Telecom Summit always features cutting-edge topics for its panel discussions. This year, in addition to its ever popular Regulatory Blockbuster, we are featuring sessions devoted to:

• The Continuing Evolution of TV;
• Cloud, Big Data and the Transformative Power of the Network;
• Cyber Defense;
• Competition in Telecom;
• Customer Experience Management;
• Converged Business Models;
• The Digitization of Canada’s Economy;
• Rage of the Machine: The growth of NFC, M2M, Mobile Commerce & More; and
• CIO/CTO Roundtable.

With so much public attention focused on telecommunications and the digital economy, no other event is quite like The Canadian Telecom Summit in covering the industry from every angle.

The Canadian Telecom Summit has something for everyone! Meet with your suppliers, customers and peers for 3 full days of thought provoking interaction.

It all takes place just 10 weeks from now. Register today.

A lot of commentators have expressed views on last Friday’s release of Digital Canada 150, the long awaited national digital strategy, such as Michael Geist’s article in the Toronto Star.

It is worth reviewing the 1-hour video of the release and follow-up interview with Industry Minister Moore, which has been archived. Fascinating remarks.

The Minister’s prepared remarks are available from the Industry Canada website. I think there are interesting insights that emerged from the interview that begins around the 23:00 mark on the video.

There are remarkably candid comments from the Minister at the 38:30 mark on the video, when he was asked about the outcomes being sought by taking action on wholesale roaming fees and TV channel unbundling.

Choice, choice and more choice. And competition of course on the first one (on the roaming fees). This has been a longstanding gap and to be self-critical, I wish we had moved on this file, on the roaming fees, much sooner, because it actually may have had a material impact on the scene right now in Canada’s wireless world, but it matters and will still matter going forward.

It is an important statement that merits further examination, and demonstrates how important it is for the government to get its rules right. Are the right rules in place now? If these rules had been in place when the AWS spectrum was first auctioned, how would the marketplace be different today?

Digital Canada 150 was four years in the making. Read the report [pdf], watch the video and consider how we are creating a framework for Canada’s leadership in a digital enabled world.

I expect that there will be much discussion of the strategy at The Canadian Telecom Summit, June 16-18 in Toronto as we explore the theme of “Future-proofing Our Place in a Digital World.” Have you registered yet? Take advantage of reduced rate registration prices in effect through the end of April.

What are your thoughts on Digital Canada 150? Your comments are welcome.

For years, I have been writing about concerns that not enough is being done to get devices and connectivity into low income households with school aged kids. An article in the Toronto Star provides a troubling description of the growing digital divide.

Almost 60 per cent of Ontario schools allow students to BYOD — bring your own device — to class, a practice trending across the province despite concerns over a growing “digital divide,” says a new report on technology in education.

The report, “Digital Learning in Ontario Schools: The New Normal” [pdf], was produced by People for Education. The report concludes with 5 recommendations:

• Develop a working definition of digital literacy
• Establish a framework for evaluation of quality and value of ICT investments
• Support teachers’ digital professional development
• Bridge the digital divide
• Develop policy to ensure quality learning resources.

I’ll focus on the question of the digital divide.

The government should change the focus of its broadband programmes. We need to ensure that “affordability” becomes the primary criterion for government subsidies in a national digital strategy. Rural broadband initiatives that give grants based on geography rather than financial need may be politically attractive – the ceremonial cheque being handed to a local MP is certain to get coverage in the local papers and in election campaign materials – but such initiatives fail to address the most substantial digital divide, the divide based on income.

As my regular readers are aware, almost half of all households in Canada’s lowest income quintile lack a home computer. Affordability is keeping a million households from digital connectivity. That is a challenge for both urban and rural Canadians. 

Kids who don’t have access to a connected computing device simply can’t succeed in today’s classrooms with digital curricula.

As Industry Minister James Moore prepares to launch Canada’s national digital strategy, we should be looking for the federal government to be supporting programmes that help ensure that every household with school aged children has access to computers and devices with internet connectivity.

The Royal Society of Canada released its Expert Panel Report on the Review of Safety Code 6: Potential Health Risks of Radiofrequency Fields [pdf] earlier today.

The panel was established in response to a request from Health Canada to examine five key questions to determining whether Health Canada’s proposed changes to Safety Code 6 provide adequate protection from adverse health effects:

• Do the basic restrictions specified in Safety Code 6 (2013) provide adequate protection for both workers and the general population from established adverse health effects from Radiofrequency (RF) fields?
• Are there any other established adverse health effects occurring at exposure levels below the Basic Restrictions in Safety Code 6 (2013) that should be considered for revising the Basic Restrictions and Reference Levels in Safety Code 6 (2013)?
• Is there sufficient evidence upon which to establish separate Basic Restrictions or recommendations for the eye?
• Do the Reference Levels established in Safety Code 6 (2013) provide adequate protection against exceeding the Basic Restrictions in Safety Code 6 (2013)?
• Should additional precautionary measures be introduced into the human exposure limits in Safety Code 6 (2013)? If so, what is recommended and why?

In 1998, Health Canada first commissioned the Royal Society to examine Safety Code 6 to assess consistency with the scientific literature in setting limits to protect the public from adverse health risks. This led to a Expert Panel report in March 1999. While there have been changes made to Safety Code 6 over the past 15 years, public concerns continue to be raised in respect of RF exposure that fall within the limits of the code. So, in 2013, Health Canada once again commissioned the Royal Society to strike an independent expert panel.

At nearly 120 pages plus appendices, it is a hefty read.

The bottom line? A single statement in the Public Summary says it best: “the Panel has concluded that the balance of evidence at this time does not indicate negative health effects from exposure to RF energy below the limits recommended in the Safety Code.”

However, recognizing that research on many of the health effects is ongoing the Panel recommends that Health Canada should continue to monitor the literature and further, that Health Canada should “aggressively pursue scientific research” to clarify the RF energy-cancer issue and further investigate the question of electromagnetic hypersensitivity.

How did the Society answer the questions?

• Yes
• Unable to identify any
• No
• Not quite
• Health Canada should expand its risk communication strategy and incorporate suggestions on practical measures that Canadians can take to reduce their exposure around cell phone use

How competitive is Canada’s telecommunications market?

That question has been one of the more fiercely debated subjects around water-coolers and dinner parties. Pundits and politicians have made telecom competition an issue that stimulated advertising on our TV networks over the past year and figured prominently in the latest federal budget.

So, in cooperation with the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, The 2014 Canadian Telecom Summit is going to examine “Competition in Telecom” through the eyes of some of the top telecom competition economists on the continent.

Taking place on Monday June 16, the session will be moderated by Dvai Ghose of Canaccord Genuity and will feature:

• Robert Crandall [Senior Fellow, Brookings Institute]
• John Mayo [Professor, Georgetown University]
• Eli Noam [Professor, Columbia University]
• Roger Ware [Professor, Queens University]
• Len Waverman [Dean, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University]

All of these economists have considerable expertise in the economics of telecommunications and have testified in regulatory and competition proceedings. It should be a fascinating session – entertaining and educational.

One of the many sessions at The 2014 Canadian Telecom Summit, taking place June 16-18 in Toronto.

It is a new budget year. Have you registered yet?