With a press release this morning, the CRTC announced the initial launch of text messaging for 9-1-1 services for hearing or speech impaired persons.

Hearing or speech impaired persons in the Metro Vancouver and select surrounding areas will be the first to get access to text with 9-1-1. The CRTC also announced that the City of Calgary is expected to make text with 9-1-1 service available as of March 24, 2014.

CRTC Chair Jean-Pierre Blais says:

The availability of Text with 9-1-1 represents a significant advancement in emergency communications and will improve the safety of those who are hearing or speech impaired. We now call upon all emergency call centres across the country to work with their respective governments and expeditiously offer this important service in their areas.

It sounds great.

Regrettably, I am not convinced this is a service that truly meets the needs of the community it is intended to serve.

Just read the instructions on how to make a text 9-1-1 call. In addition to pre-registration being required, the number of steps required are hardly in keeping with what any of us expect from an emergency service bureau.

• Unlock the cell phone keypad if it is locked. Some cell phones do not allow receiving and/or sending text messages if the keypad is locked, even though they allow a user to dial 9-1-1. “Unlocking” means entering your personal password or pressing an unlock button on the phone.
• Dial 9-1-1 on your cell phone to place an emergency voice call.
• Monitor the cell phone display to ensure that the call is connected. Shortly after the call is connected, you should receive an initial text message from a 9-1-1 call centre. If you do not receive the initial text message within two minutes, you may end the voice call and redial 9-1-1.
• The number you will see on your cell phone will have 13 digits and will begin with 555911.
• Once the initial text message is received, you should reply to this text message and provide the 9-1-1 call taker with the information that they are requesting, such as the nature of the emergency and your location. Keep your text messages brief and concise.
• You should keep the 9-1-1 voice call connected during the entire text messaging session if possible. This will permit the 9-1-1 call taker to hear any background noises that can be helpful to assess the emergency, and will provide enhanced 9-1-1 functions.
• You will know that the T9-1-1 session has been concluded when you receive the message “End of 9-1-1 Call”.
• After receiving the “End of 9-1-1 Call” message, if you need to further communicate with the 9-1-1 call centre, you will need to initiate a new text session by dialing 9-1-1 to re-establish contact with the 9-1-1 call centre and communicate again by replying to the text message.

I lost faith with the line “If you do not receive the initial text message within two minutes, you may end the voice call and redial 9-1-1.”

Not every phone is even compatible with the requirement to keep a voice call active while simultaneously opening up a texting session. Each carrier has a list of compatible phones on their text 9-1-1 web pages. We have a solution designed to enable text messaging – a 20 year old technology – that can only be used from a phone that supports more advanced messaging applications. The service simply will not work from older devices.

The CRTC was warned last Friday by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) that there were serious concerns with today’s announcement.

There is great risk that many believe the 9-1-1 system can provide fast and effective response to emergencies, when the technological reality is quite the opposite.

The OPP letter says that the police had previously asked the CRTC to consider province wide roll outs of the service to ensure members of the affected user community could be more confident of service in all areas of each province. Instead, the instructions page tells users to confirm they are in a coverage area.

The OPP letter concluded “urgently and respectfully request[ing] the CRTC either reverses the decision or discourages the practice of sending Text with 9-1-1 calls on legacy 9-1-1 networks.”

How did the CRTC respond to this urgent appeal? Given today’s announcement, it appears that the Commission did not give police concerns enough weight to justify a delay in implementation.

The text to 9-1-1 solution appears to be a solution that sounded better in the design than it turned out in practice. Was there sufficient consultation with the user community and consideration of broad user adoption?

How well did this solution score in focus groups considering user interface alternatives?

Should people need a training course and have to invest in new mobile handsets in order to make emergency calls?

It used to be so much easier to manage a system of cross subsidies for communications.

If a regulator wanted consumer services to be subsidized by businesses, rural to be subsidized by urban, local subsidized by long distance, TV production subsidized by distribution, it could just issue an order to make it so. So let it be written; so let it be done.

There were few, if any, other suppliers of those services, so there were limited arbitrage opportunities.

There is a political appeal to using the communications regulator to engineer payment plans for social benefits. It is a hidden tax on communications services, managed outside the government tax system. The government gets to take credit for providing social benefits without the blame for higher taxes.

Then competition came along. First we saw new companies enter the market using similar technologies and the regulator found ways to manage the system of subsidies.

But increasing pressures on the system coming from substitutable services and applications threaten to erode the system of cross subsidies. An article in the New York Times reports that the US regulator, the FCC, is setting up a task force to examine the US Universal Services Fund which administers billions of dollars in subsidies for schools, rural markets and low income users. The panel is expected to examine both sources and uses of the fund.

Skype and Facetime and other non-interconnected communications services don’t contribute to telecom subsidies. They shouldn’t. Frankly, they couldn’t. Over the top video providers don’t contribute to production funds. How would one even define the class of apps that would need to register as payors?

As end users transfer from legacy, subsidy-paying services to applications and service providers that are outside the system, the burden increases for those who remain. As the burden gets spread across a shrinking base of users remaining, the taxation rate can increase, creating even greater opportunities for arbitrage, unless there are changes to the funds being drawn.

In a competitive environment, how should the system of subsidies evolve?

Bell Aliant issued a press release today that caught my eye, announcing that it is extending fibre to the home (FTTH) service to three additional towns in Newfoundland and Labrador: Harbour Grace, Deer Lake and Stephenville.

These are some pretty small communities. Harbour Grace is a town of about 3100 people; Deer Lake is home to 5,000; Stephenville has a population of 8,000.

Bell Aliant is investing $4.8M to provide fibre optic connectivity to 8,100 homes and businesses in these 3 communities. Bell Aliant’s FTTH service, FibreOP, is available to more than 800,000 homes and businesses in more than 70 communities across Atlantic Canada and Ontario, with a target to have one million premises passed by the end of 2014.

Today’s announcement brings advanced digital infrastructure to communities that aren’t suburbs of major metropolitan areas. Harbour Grace is 100 kms from St. John’s. It is 30 kms off the Trans-Canada highway. Deer Lake is 50 kms north east from Corner Brook; Stephenville is 80 kms southwest of Corner Brook, the former home of a US air force base.

There is no government broadband program driving the investment, but there are competitive pressures at play. Eastlink offers cable-based TV, phone and internet.

Bell Aliant’s FTTH services in the province will be available to more than 139,000 premises, an investment of $65 million since 2011. At less than $600 per premises, the expansion is an interesting contrast to the costs described in my blog post from last week discussing Australia’s government-led experience to date.

A damning report on Australia’s National Broadband Network was published yesterday, citing outrageous costs per subscriber.

In his article “Australia’s failed experiment in government-owned broadband” on TechPolicyDaily.com, Jeffrey Eisenach says that Australia has made fibre available to only about 260,000 premises despite having spent AU$7.3 billion. Of those, only 78,000 subscribers have actually signed up, resulting in costs of $93,000 per subscriber.

Less than a quarter (23%) of the subscribers are signing up for fibre optic type speeds of 100Mbps/40Mbps. The rest are taking more conventional 25Mbps/5Mbps (or slower) services.

The article is an important read for those calling for government intervention into Canadian broadband markets. Recall last summer, a major union was leading a call for the government to create a crown corporation to offer communications services.

As I wrote last August, as much as Canadians love to kvetch about our communications companies, do we really want a government agency to take their place?

I had a breakfast meeting today with a colleague and a community leader joined us.

Our conversation was pretty wide ranging, including topics such as emergency preparedness, disaster recovery, cloud strategies, economic development, cell towers and more. All of this in one hour while still having enough time to enjoy kippers and bagels. Yes, we spoke with food in our mouths.

We talked about how the community agencies responded to the ice storms in late December and where the communications systems succeeded on some levels but failed to handle the peak loads of traffic from citizen calls and web traffic.

We started talking about development of a smart city strategy. I suggested that whatever overall strategy emerged, it would be important to identify bite-sized pieces. Get local citizens involved to help prioritize which bites should be nibbled first.

More than once on these pages I have said “Set clear objectives. Align activities with the achievement of those objectives. Stop doing things that are contrary to the objectives.”

A city won’t become a smart city overnight. It doesn’t have to. We don’t go to school and get programmed all at once.

But a city should get a little smarter every day. Like all of us, building a smart city should be a process requiring ‘continuing education’ and skills enhancement. It needs an evangelist to be working with community agencies and local businesses to develop a culture of digital leadership.

This could be an approach for all levels of government as we develop digital strategies.

The way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

Building a smart city means creating a culture that works to make the community a little bit smarter every day.