The Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS) issued its sixth annual report [pdf] earlier this morning. While complaints increased by about 25% year over year, the CCTS acknowledged “this as evidence that our efforts to increase public awareness of CCTS have become increasingly effective.”

It isn’t really a surprise that wireless services represent 60% of all complaints. After all, there are now 28M wireless subscribers, compared to just under 12M residential phone lines and 11M internet connections. As such, wireless represents about 55% of all consumer access connections and of the three, it is the service that has variable pricing and would be most susceptible to variable connectivity conditions.

What is interesting is looking at comparative data between the carriers. There are clearly differences in the number of customers with each service provider, but in the area of contract disputes, Bell and Rogers (including Fido) each had about a third of all complaints, while TELUS had only one fifth the number of the other major carriers. Indeed, TELUS customers generated 20% fewer contract complaints compared to Wind Mobile, despite TELUS having more than 10 times the number of wireless customers – not even including millions of TELUS residential phone and internet customers.

Under the area of roaming, Rogers and Fido were responsible for more than half the complaints, Bell and Virgin were about a quarter while TELUS was again behind Wind Mobile. Some perspective is important. Despite all of the attention being placed on roaming and data surcharges on wireless and bandwidth charges on internet, last year had only 1500 complaints related to roaming, data and bandwidth charges, filed with CCTS out of 40M connections.

Western Canadians seemed to be happier with their service providers than Ontario residents. With 38% of Canada’s population, Ontario generated 52% of CCTS complaints; BC and Alberta have roughly a quarter (24.4%) of Canada’s population, but represented only 19.6% of the complaints.

When everything is running normally, it is often hard to distinguish between different service providers. Technological advantages of one over another can be transient as capital investment catches up. The biggest differentiation can be in how different service providers handle problems: how difficult is it for customers to get through to a real human who shows empathy and somehow projects a smile through the phone line; are customer service agents empowered to take ownership and resolve issues in one call?

In my corporate executive life nearly 20 years ago, I spent part of an afternoon fielding calls in the residential service call centre; it was the toughest 2 hours in my business career.

Many superficial commentators on the Canadian telecommunications industry lazily lump service providers together – incumbents versus new entrants; Monopolists; Big 3. The CCTS report shows there are differences in customer service and complaint handling.

As we head into the peak Christmas season for wireless sales, will consumers refer to the CCTS report as an indicator of customer satisfaction?

On reading a story that said Ottawa rejected Lenovo as a possible suitor for BlackBerry, I tweeted “Didn’t fit national digital strategy” in reply to Greg O’Brien’s comment “How unsurprising.”

I was only partially facetious.

I am convinced that somewhere in Ottawa there must be some kind of an undisclosed national digital strategy.

As millions of dollars were handed out three years ago today, in coordinated events, multiple news releases [such as this one] on Industry Canada’s website indicated “Canada’s Economic Action Plan provided $225 million for the development and implementation of a strategy to extend broadband coverage.”

Development and implementation. We couldn’t have the implementation without the development, could we?

Six months earlier, then Industry Minister Tony Clement said, “Now is the time for the private sector to step up and contribute their ideas for a digital strategy and, when that strategy is in place, to implement the plan.” First you have a plan, then you implement it.

The private sector stepped up at the time and contributed thousands of hours of time, millions of dollars of effort, to contribute their ideas. They bought into the vision.

To date, three Ministers have failed to deliver government’s part of the deal – the promised strategy.

In 2011, the Industry Minister Christian Paradis referred to different elements of the strategy in his remarks to The 2011 Canadian Telecom Summit. He spoke of different elements: encouraging investment, encouraging adoption, building a skilled workforce, growing the ICT sector and developing content. It was as though he was reciting from the table of contents. “Our government considers a digital economy strategy to be one of its most important objectives.”

A year later, in June 2012 at The Canadian Telecom Summit, Minister Paradis said, “We are still developing a Canadian digital economy strategy. And I am committed to delivering it by the end of the year.” That was a year and a half ago.

“As the foundation of our digital economy, it all starts with you — the telecommunications industry. From equipment manufacturers to service providers and from industry associations to consultants, you play an essential role.”

The global digital economy doesn’t wait. While investors have placed multi-billion dollar bets, trying to acquire companies like Mobilicity, Allstream, or BlackBerry or competitors investing in digital spectrum and physical infrastructure, the government has failed to deliver “one of its most important objectives.”

Six months ago, I wrote about “Inconsistent messages; predictable turmoil” saying “The lessons for Ottawa: Set clear objectives. Align activities with the achievement of those objectives. Stop doing things that are contrary to the objectives.”

Three and a half years later, it is time for the Government to “step up” and lead by releasing a coherent, consistent national digital strategy. Jobs and investment dollars are at stake.

An OpEd in Forbes says net neutrality rules could block innovation that can offers more services at a lower cost. Everett Ehrlich was a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration. In his piece, he writes that net neutrality could be keeping consumer bills higher than they might be otherwise:

Moreover, getting rid of “neutrality” would lower consumers’ bills. That’s because the Internet is something economists call a “two-sided market.” A newspaper such as USATODAY is such a two-sided market – it charges advertisers to reach its readers, and it charges its readers to see its advertisements.

If a newspaper wasn’t allowed to take money from its advertisers, the reader would have to pay more. It’s the same with the Internet; if a provider can’t charge the big websites for a premium connection (if they want one) then the consumer has to pay instead, meaning consumers subsidize the companies sending big data packets.

Ehrlich is looking for the new FCC Chair to “end this tired debate” in the United States. “The rules that governed e-mail two decades ago won’t bring us the new services that lie ahead, and an Internet stuck in “neutral” isn’t going anywhere.”

What are the implications for Canada? The CRTC imposed the world’s first regulations on what we call Internet Traffic Management Practices more than 4 years ago? Will we retain the quaint principle from the email era dictating that a heart monitor connecting “a patient to an online medical service crosses the Internet no faster than a video of a cat playing the xylophone”?

Bloomberg Businessweek writes about T-Mobile CEO John Legere’s shake-up of traditional business models in the US wireless industry in “T-Mobile’s Wacky Plan to Trash the Wireless Business Model“. Earlier this year, Macquarie Bank predicted T-Mobile would lose 1.6 million subscribers this year and an additional 400,000 in 2014. But that was before T-Mobile started to shake things up in the marketplace. In the second quarter, T-Mobile added 685,000 postpaid customers beating US industry leaders Verizon (472,000) and AT&T (153,000).

Legere has not been overcome by a temporary spasm of crazed generosity. His is merely the first company in the U.S. market to acknowledge reality. Wireless telecommunications in the U.S. is on its way to becoming what the industry has fought against for two decades: a commodity business, where carriers and un-carriers all look the same and prices keep going down.

T-Mobile has been investing to turn around the market perception. As the number four player in the US, T-Mobile needed to convince customers that its network coverage may be smaller but it is still big enough. Its network now covers 200M people, about 60% of the population of the US.

T-Mobile’s year of un-carrier behavior has proved that in fact, above about 150 million POPs, customers are sensitive to price. And the simpler plans get, the harder it is to shade price differences with tiered plans and phone subsidies. All the other carriers are going to have to come down and fight with the smiling guy in pink.

The story hits news stands on November 1, but is available online.

While CBC may attract lots of visits to its website through articles warning of wireless radiation, it neglected coverage of an important release from a public health official. Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health has recommended that the City of Toronto eliminate its policy of Prudent Avoidance, a 5-year old policy of asking wireless carriers to keep RF emission levels 100 times below Health Canada’s public exposure guideline, Safety Code 6.

The summary from the Medical Officer of Health says:

From its review of recent health evidence, TPH [Toronto Public Health] notes that the majority scientific opinion indicates that the health risk to the public from cell towers and other telecommunications sources of RFs is low.
…
Based on a review of evidence and TPH’s experience implementing the policy, continued application of the [Prudent Avoidance] policy in the form of a stricter exposure guideline is no longer necessary as it does not confer a health benefit to the residents of Toronto.

In a more detailed report, Toronto Public Health sharply criticized the opposing viewpoints.

The most vocal opposing view has been put forward by scientists contributing to the BioInitiative Report. This report has been evaluated by a number of health scientists and public health agencies as being characterized by biased and selective interpretation of scientific data, leading to unscientific and alarming conclusions about a range of health conditions.

Among the most damning critiques of the Bio-Initiative Report, incorporated in the Toronto Public Health report by footnote, was an article in Science-Based Medicine that refers to the BioInitiative Report as “an egregiously slanted review of health and biological effects of electromagnetic fields (EMF) of the sort that are produced by power lines, cellular telephones, Wi-Fi, and other mainstays of modern life.”

Toronto Public Health addressed the question of non-specific symptoms – symptoms that some have called environmental sensitivity to RF and other electromagnetic fields.

There is, however, growing evidence that the perception of exposure is associated with experiencing symptoms and as such, that a nocebo effect with respect to cell towers is likely contributing to individuals‟ reporting of such health complaints. (This conclusion in no way diminishes the serious nature of these complaints which some individuals experience as severe and debilitating.) The nocebo effect refers to the observation that people may experience adverse symptoms because of their negative expectations or concerns about cell towers. In particular, people tend to feel more at risk from environmental health hazards when they lack control over their exposure or have little perceived benefit from exposure.

While CBC chose to give unwarranted attention to some well meaning but ill-informed junk science, Toronto Public Health noted that broadcast antennas, not cell towers, were the major contributors to RF levels in Toronto. It is unclear whether the authors of the CBC articles understood that CBC’s own radio and TV transmitters have been beaming radio frequency energy for decades before the cell phone was introduced. Indeed, Industry Canada’s evaluation of EMF Intensity in the City of Toronto found that the CBC Broadcast Centre is Toronto’s hottest location, still less than 6% of limits.

The Toronto Public Health report cites a review by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health for a helpful explanation for why RF levels would not increase over time:

Although intuitively, one may assume that an increase in base stations means higher ambient exposure, mobile phones do not need to use as much power (due to adaptive control) to communicate with the base stations due to shorter distances. As a good connection translates into lower output power levels, urban centres with higher base station densities often experience lower RF than rural centres.

I wrote about that effect last year in a blog post called “We need more towers.” CBC did a disservice to Canadians in promoting purveyors of junk science while failing to cover the important report from Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health that recommends the elimination of its prudent avoidance policy. The full report is worth reading.