I have been taking a look at some of the numbers released by Statistics Canada in its Survey of Household Spending to see how Canadians are adopting technology. The 2011 SHS was released a couple weeks ago.

It is encouraging to see that ownership of home computers has increased from 82.7% in 2010 to 84.5% in 2011, meaning that only 1 in 6 households still lacks a computer. It is an improvement, but clearly there is much more work to be done.

In the meantime, household internet connectivity has increased even more: from 78.4% in 2010 to 80.5% in 2011. That means we have gone from connecting 94.8% of households with a computer to 95.27% in 2011.

I found it interesting to see how Canadians are connecting. High speed telephone company connections feed 30.4% of Canadian households, a decrease from 31.9% the year before. Cable has increased its share, from 34.2% to 35.4%. Interestingly, wireless connections are now found in 8.1% of households, up from 5.3% the year before, while “other internet connections” have climbed from 1.3% to 1.5%. Dial-up still serves 5.2%, down from 5.7%.

Wireless internet connections are climbing in prevalence in serving Canadian households. This will certainly add pressure to the types of service packages being offered and the download tiers being offered, while adding to demands on network capacities. We’ll be looking at some of these issues in a panel called “Unplugged: The Next Generation of Wireless” on Wednesday, June 5 at The 2013 Canadian Telecom Summit.

To date, most government broadband initiatives have focused on subsidizing infrastructure, intervention to stimulate the supply and lower costs for one or more service providers – ultimately in the hopes of local stimulation of demand through lower prices.

Such programs have had mixed results and have generally looked solely at rural and remote areas, providing a supply-side subsidy regardless of the ability to pay.

Unfortunately, we typically ignore the broader issues associated with the demand-side. It is not just rural and remote households that need attention. Many households in urban centres still have not signed up for internet access. Many households still don’t have a computer. For these people, computers and tablets are simply not on their list of priorities.

Yesterday, the FCC in the US announced an expansion of the Connect2Compete program aimed at addressing the digital literacy gap among low income households.

Currently one-third of Americans don’t subscribe to broadband services at home and more than 60 million Americans lack digital literacy skills, which are the basic skills needed to use a computer and the Internet. Connect2Compete is a national nonprofit coalition dedicated to helping narrow the digital divide by making high-speed Internet access, computers, educational and job content, and digital literacy training more accessible for millions of Americans without home connectivity.

Yesterday’s announcement brought the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) authority into the coalition, to work with local public housing authorities and other HUD-funded organizations to encourage eligible families to access resources available through Connect2Compete, including digital literacy training opportunities. Connect2Compete and Best Buy are launching a national digital literacy training program at partner facilities, including HUD Neighborhood Networks Centers, United Way, and Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

As FCC Chair Genachowski observed in his remarks yesterday:

The costs of digital exclusion are rising. Offline Americans are missing out on opportunities in education, health care, and employment. Over 80% of Fortune 500 companies post job openings exclusively online. Over half of today’s jobs require technology skills, and nearly 80% of jobs in the next decade are projected to require digital skills. Closing the broadband adoption and digital literacy skills gap is critical to the future of our economy.

The digital component of jobs has been identified here before in my post called “Menial no more.”

In Canada, the numbers are close 1 in 5 households lacking computers and connections, compared to 1 in 3 households in the US, but that number is way too high. A little over a year ago, I wrote that more than 600,000 households in Canada’s 3 largest cities don’t have a computer, let alone a broadband connection.

It is time for Canadians to turn our attention to closing our own broadband adoption and digital literacy gaps.

On Wednesday June 5, we will be looking at “Building an Innovation Economy” at The Canadian Telecom Summit, one of a number of sessions related to our overall theme of “Defining our place in a digital world.” Early bird rates expire February 28. Have you registered yet?

When I first started working in the telecom industry, I was in a group that included “Dial Admin” – the administration of phone numbers.

We would maintain the inventory of phone numbers and provide the business office with lists of phone numbers that could be assigned to new customers. We would try to assign numbers somewhat randomly in order to balance the load on the terminating portion of the electro-mechanical switching equipment. In those days (1979-80), digital switching was just being launched. We had a lot of late-60’s era electronic “stored-program” switching, some 50’s era cross-bar and a lot of old step-by-step equipment.

Step-by-step allowed short-cuts and strange dialing logic. For example, before it was replaced by digital switching, the London Clarence Street step was one of the largest in Canada, with the 519-43x phone numbers (432, 433, 434, 438 and 439). Some people referred to their numbers with the prefix “GEneral”, since G-E represents “43” on the dial. The switch was configured to basically ignore the initial 4 allowing people to either skip that digit, or dial it repeatedly. And when I say dial, remember that step-by-step did not recognize tone dialing. So it was real rotary dialing. The digit 3 would unlock the logic and then the next digit would start routing the call as the rest of the digits were dialed.

That was a big switch, with close to 50,000 numbers being served.

We had small step switches in a number of remote communities that could fit in cans mounted on phone poles. In some of these places, people had 2-digit phone numbers. Can you imagine their reaction when the phone company came around with a digital upgrade that brought tone dialing, voice mail, caller ID and 7-digit phone numbers. A lot of people didn’t think the transition from a two-digit phone number was worth it. But that was the price of progress.

All this is background to my initial reaction to a news release this morning that two more area codes are being added to the Greater Toronto Area, bringing us to a total of 3 area codes (24,000,000 numbers) to serve the City of Toronto and another 24,000,000 numbers to serve the surrounding environs. The 437 area code will be added to the 416/647 area codes; the 365 area code will be added in the 905/289 region.

These two new codes bring Ontario’s total to 13, which yields 104 million phone numbers. What is driving this? According to the press release, “Increasing demand for telephone numbers, particularly for wireless devices, has created the need for additional numbers to serve customers in these regions.”

Our household has 12 numbers serving 8 people: including 7 mobile device numbers. Two of those numbers are for a distinctive ringing feature that came with my line, but I have no clue what the actual numbers are.

I understand the fact that we have moved from an era of phone numbers being assigned to places (your home number shared by the household versus your office number), into an era of one or more phone numbers being assigned to a person.

But I wonder if we really need 10 numbers per person.

Do data devices need a dial-able phone number? How many numbers are being consumed by our implementation of number portability. With 6 different area codes soon to be in play, do most people in the Toronto area know when they are making a long distance call?

Trying to remember 10-digit phone numbers is eased somewhat by the prevalence of mobile phone books, but there are real issues for those Canadians who don’t have access to mobile phones. To what extent are human factors being considered in the continuing expansion of our number space?

Citrix is releasing a new survey of mobile users with some interesting information about the relationship Americans have with their mobile devices. Citrix says American smartphone users spend almost every waking minute with their devices, checking news and social media feeds first thing each morning, eating meals with device in hand, and watching reality TV shows in secret.

In addition, Citrix ByteMobile released its latest Mobile Analytics Report, which shows many misconceptions by mobile subscribers with respect to their consumption of content and data.

Among the highlights:

• Half of all web pages take more than 8 seconds to load, but a third of mobile device owners will give up in 8 seconds or less. Half of these users blame their carrier while the other half blame the website.
• The report found that the vast majority (92%) of video is low resolution, but two-thirds of users think most of their mobile video is high resolution. Nearly three quarters of mobile video viewers seek out most of the video they watch, rather than wait for it to come to them.
• Among millenials, first thing in the morning, nearly two thirds check their social media feeds. The other third look at the news.
• Nearly half (46%) admitting to watching a questionable television show on a mobile device that they would never watch with their friends. Pawn Stars, Storage Wars and The Real Housewives series led the list of shows watched behind closed doors.

There is an infographic at right with some of the conclusions from the reports.

The 2013 Canadian Telecom Summit will feature a number of panels that explore these trends. On Monday June 3, we will have panels looking at Devices, Screens & Apps and Business Models in a Converged World. On Tuesday June 4, there is a panel looking at The Revolution of TV: Content Anywhere & Anyhow.

Have you registered yet?

Having released a National Broadband Plan 4 years ago, the US has been moving down a path to execute on its digital strategy.

A paper was released yesterday by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies [pdf] that struck me as highlighting that those of us in Canada don’t even know what we don’t know.

In the paper, “Broadband Adoption and Usage: What Has Four Years Taught Us?”, the author John Horrigan writes:

To summarize, we learned that:

1. The previous decade’s fast growth rates in broadband adoption was not sustainable into this decade;
2. Barriers to adoption are more complex than we thought;
3. The non-adoption problem is solvable. The research showed that non-adopters aren’t a hopeless group of (mostly old) people who dislike technology. The right kinds of programs can lure people to broadband;
4. Smartphones help close adoption gaps, but have limits as standalone access devices and are mostly used to add to users’ access means, not as a substitute for wireline.

The report expands on each of these points.

I still hear too many in Canada focusing on the supply side. Are we doing enough to understand and address the barriers to adoption in Canada?