With the news that George Takach has dropped out of the Liberal leadership race, there is no longer a candidate who puts digital issues in such a position of prominence in their campaign. The end of his campaign was news that was appropriately released on Twitter:

I am ending my #lpcldr campaign + supporting @justintrudeau to make Canada work better #cdnpoli bit.ly/jt-gt-en

— George Takach (@georgetakach) February 25, 2013

And with that, we will need to see who will take on the title of “digital candidate”. Mr. Takach had tried to recruit support from the gamer community, creating Geeks4George, to take advantage of the Liberal Party’s new “supporter” category of voters that doesn’t require full membership. As Warren Kinsella recently wrote, it is a category of leadership voters that appears ripe for gaming the system.

Who will provide the most serious voice for digital economy issues? Marc Garneau has been the Industry critic for the Liberals and has therefore owned party responsibility for the digital file. As I wrote before, from the beginning, Mr. Garneau has promised “As leader, I will place a relentless focus on the development of a balanced, creative, knowledge-based economy.”

Joyce Murray claims to have been first to include digital issues in her campaign. Citing her past experience as Minister of Management Services in British Columbia, Ms. Murray led the “Bridging the Digital Divide” project connecting 119 rural and remote communities. Strangely, the digital policy page acknowledges that 7 years later, BC still hasn’t achieved her goal (“Today, B.C. is very close to her target of 98% of communities connected to affordable high speed service”). Rural broadband projects use government money to subsidize broadband prices in regions without regard to financial need. It is a supply side approach that is politically expedient and popular, but we have seen that such programmes ignore urban households that find “affordable high speed service” to be not so affordable.

Like many candidates, Ms. Murray’s position paper is silent on policies that address the income divide which left more than 100,000 Vancouver households without a computer, let alone broadband.

With Mr. Takach out of the race, will a new digital candidate emerge? Where does the Digital Economy rank as an issue for the Liberal party leadership candidates?

In just over 3 months, The 2013 Canadian Telecom Summit will be under way, the 12th annual edition of Canada’s premier gathering of stakeholders in the communications and information technology sectors.

Each year, we try to ensure that fresh perspectives are brought forward, and this year’s event has already confirmed some new faces with different perspectives for our delegates. This is especially true on our closing day, Wednesday June 5.

That day will be starting out with a keynote presentation by Sandy Carter, IBM’s Vice President of Social Business Evangelism. She is a best selling author and she has been recognized as one of the most influential women in Web 2.0 technology. She will be followed by a panel looking at Building an Innovation Economy, moderated by Namir Anani of the ICT Council, with a powerful line-up of executives bringing a variety of perspectives:

• Warren Jestin, Chief Economist at Scotiabank
• Chris Hodgson of Google
• Ron Styles, CEO of SaskTel
• John Weigelt, National Technology Officer of Microsoft Canada

Following coffee, Wednesday morning continues with a CIO/CTO Roundtable, moderated by Mark Kummer of Cisco and joined by:

• Dave Codack, VP & Head, Employee Technology, Network and Contact Center Services for TD Bank Group
• Eugene Roman, CTO at Canadian Tire
• Bill Sayles, EVP Business Transformation at TELUS

Kirstine Stewart, EVP of English Services at CBC will be delivering a keynote address to round out our Wednesday morning program.

Wednesday afternoon, Rita Trichur from the Globe and Mail moderates a session called Unplugged: The next generation of wireless. With the news last week that the auction for the 700 MHz block may be delayed until late 2013¹, this session will explore the spectrum crunch, impacts of the ever growing world of wireless connectivity and more.

Our Tuesday afternoon programme has a fresh look as well. Roberta Fox is moderating a session that looks at how customers get to speak out, with consumer advocates for individuals and small business owners as well as the leaders of agencies that seek to protect consumers.

That afternoon will conclude with a look at The Revolution of TV: Content Anywhere and Anyhow, featuring top executives from the broadcasters, distributors, creators and the technologies that enable the range of delivery methods we enjoy today.

The 2013 Canadian Telecom Summit features what may be our strongest program yet. Our panels on opening day, Monday June 3 cover a range of issues with top thought leaders, including:

• Business Transformation;
• Devices, Screens & Apps;
• Network Transformation; and
• Business Models in a Converged World.

Tuesday June 4 includes the always popular Regulatory Blockbuster. Check out the complete conference agenda.

The 2013 Canadian Telecom Summit runs from June 3-5, 2013 at the Toronto Congress Centre on Dixon Road (near the airport). You won’t want to miss it.

Early bird prices are in effect through the end of February. Have you registered yet?

---

¹ In an interview on CBC’s Power and Politics on February 20, Industry Minister Christian Paradis said that the auction would take place by the end of the year [check the 28:30 mark on this video]. Prior statements had put the date in the first half of 2013.

A press release this morning from the office of Industry Minister Christian Paradis encapsulates some important data about Canada’s information and communications technology sector:

Canada is a leader in wireless telecommunications equipment, mobile and gaming software development, and business analytics. It is home to a quarter of North America’s fastest-growing wireless companies and six internationally competitive ICT regional clusters. In 2011, the sector comprised 33,500 firms that contributed $62.7 billion to our GDP (4.9 percent), had over $168 billion in revenues and employed more than 550,000 people, representing 3.2 percent of national employment. In 2011, the ICT sector performed 34 percent of all private sector R&D and, since 2002, has grown by 39 percent compared to the national average of 18 percent.

Catch that? A third of all of Canada’s private sector research and development is performed by 3.2% of national employment. Punching 10 times above its weight.

The sector has grown by more than double the national average.

The sector is contributing 50% more to the national GDP than its share of national employment.

The Industry Minister is heading to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to spread the word about investment opportunities Canada this week. Hopefully, he will mention that the leadership of Canada’s ICT sector will be gathering in Toronto in June at The 2013 Canadian Telecom Summit.

Keynote addresses from a dozen industry thought leaders. More than 60 industry leaders participating on panels exploring:

• The Revolution of TV: Content Anywhere & Anyhow;
• Building an Innovation Economy;
• Business Transformation;
• Devices, Screens & Apps;
• Network Transformation;
• Business Models in a Converged World;
• Consumer Issues;
• The Next Generation of Wireless; and
• CIO/CTO Roundtable; and
• the always popular Regulatory Blockbuster.

Early bird pricing for The Canadian Telecom Summit ends on Thursday. Have you registered yet?

Most of us thought that today would finally be the end of a CRTC regulatory file that had its genesis nearly 5 years ago. We’re almost done.

Let’s review.

In 2008, the CRTC issued Decision 2008-17 a revised regulatory framework for wholesale and “essential” services. That begat a series of appeals leading to Telecom Regulatory Policy 2009-34, which begat a Notice of Consultation (2009-261), which indirectly gave rise to the much reviled creation of usage based pricing for wholesale internet, approved in Decision 2010-255. The CRTC had a wholesale high speed access proceeding leading to  Telecom Regulatory Policy 2010-632. The public furor and blatant signaling from the other side of the river caused the CRTC to review wholesale residential billing practices once again (“of its own motion” – if you believe the notice) in Public Notice 2011-77 leading to Telecom Regulatory Policy 2011-703. That generated another series of appeals.

The decisions that came out today adjust much of what has been issued in the past 5 years.

I am not going to analyze the outcomes or the impacts. Each company will have its own view of whether its consumers or shareholders benefit or lose as a result. As the CRTC states in the main release, Telecom Regulatory Policy  2013-70:

the Commission expects that with these new wholesale HSA service decisions both the incumbents and the independent service providers will recognize the need to move away from regulatory processes into a period of certainty that will benefit the industry, their customers, and the Canadian economy as a whole.

It has been 5 years or more of uncertainty for Canadian internet service providers and their customers. It still isn’t over. The CRTC launched two more notices of consultation (2013-79: Review of rate principles for legacy business wholesale high-speed access services and 2013-80: Review of outstanding wholesale high-speed access service issues related to interface rates, optional upstream speed rates, and modem certification requirements).

More than anything, the lengthy process seems to demonstrate the challenge of rate regulation in a competitive marketplace.

Decisions that were made initially did not appear to appropriately consider inter-platform competition and the need for regulatory symmetry. Unintended consequences kept popping up – consequences that many felt should have been anticipated. Digital policy appeared to be delivered through tweets, rather than a cohesive national strategy. The regulation of wholesale internet access will not be one of the proudest moments in CRTC history.

Therein is the message that I see from today’s decisions. Internet services are not that complex.

But, regulatory manipulation of a competitive market is tough work.

As the CRTC prepares to intervene in mobile services, are there lessons from the internet services business?

In the recent CRTC hearing on the Wireless Code of Conduct, one of the recurring issues discussed was buyer’s remorse: can a customer change their mind after signing up and what is a reasonable period for doing so.

Carrying a title like “Telecom Consultant”, people have been known to ask me which cellphone company they should use. For the record, my brother sometimes calls me from his car asking me to look up a phone number for him, so you could say that I provide a full range of advisory services.

My response to the question of which provider is usually along the lines of “shop around” and “be sure to test drive them.” We all have different patterns of use and patterns of mobility. You want to find out if the carrier has coverage in your home and on your ride to work.

I was intrigued with yesterday’s announcement by TELUS that they have developed a Network Experience App for iOS, Android and Blackberry (5) platforms. Support for Windows Phone and BB10 is under development.

The app is designed to let customers report network issues such as: dropped calls, failed call attempts, no service, poor voice quality or slow data speeds. The app records GPS location and tower information, as well as signal strength and other network information to help TELUS identify the network elements that were serving the call when it was dropped or experiencing poor audio quality. All of this is to help identify where network enhancements need to be made. If the customer doesn’t have a network connection and is trying to report it, the app will store the report and automatically send it once the connection is restored. TELUS says that no customer identifiers are recorded.

My son enjoys when I use this blog to talk about the early days of my career. Well, back in the olden days, about twenty years ago, when we still had analog mobile phones and installed car kits, there was a bad hole in my mobile provider’s network near my old home. I would drop calls every time going through the main intersection and I could not convince the call centre folks there was a problem. We were friends with an executive at the carrier and I would kvetch to him, or his EA, or his staff nearly every time. I would be assured that the engineers checked it and it must be the way my car antenna was hooked up, or a foil wrapper on the phone or some other excuse.

That game continued until one weekend when he was driving over to my house and he dropped a call in the same spot that I had been telling him about. The network engineers got it fixed on Monday.

If only we had this app back then.