Was there an “Easter Egg” in the closing lines of a CRTC press release today?

The CRTC was talking about having completed a review of over 80 telecommunications regulations, resulting in the elimination or streamlining of more than 60 per cent of these. Importantly, regulations deemed in the public interest, such as those relating to 911 services, accessibility and customer privacy, were left unchanged.

The CRTC press release’s closing paragraph said:

Going forward, the CRTC will continue to favour market forces and carefully weigh the need for any new regulations. In particular, the CRTC will be mindful of the administrative burden any proposed requirement, enforcement measure or penalty may create for small Canadian businesses.

It seems to have come out of left field. This isn’t a boilerplate. Where did small business come into play in the rest of the press release?

Was this a statement of philosophy for the CRTC operating in the period under an interim chair?

I was looking through some old blog posts and got thinking about interesting dates.

The policy framework for the AWS auction was announced in late November, 2007, leading to an auction that started almost exactly 6 months later. The first licenses were issued in December 2008; it took a full year before the first service was launched by a new entrant using this spectrum (Wind Mobile, on December 16, 2009). From the announcement of the auction policy until service launch took more than 2 years.

There is an important lesson for those looking at timelines for the long delayed policy for the 700 MHz auction.

We will be lucky to see an auction start in calendar 2012 and, depending on the structure, it could take months for the auction to conclude. In the meantime, the clock has been continuing to run on the 5-year restriction on transfer of the AWS licenses to the big 3 carriers. We could start to see acquisitions of these new entrants as of December, 2013, for those licenses that were issued in December 2008.

There are lots of strategic options in play – another reason why The 2012 Canadian Telecom Summit will be looking at “Wireless Spectrum: Paying for Air – 700MHz, Whitespace and more” in a session on June 6. Early bird rates are available until the end of February.

Have you registered yet?

Wednesday February 8 is Bell’s “Let’s Talk Day“. On February 8, Bell will donate 5 cents to mental health programs for every text message sent and every long distance call made by Bell and Bell Aliant customers.

I wrote last year that I admired the way Bell was willing to have its brand associated with mental health. There are very few national brands that are powerful enough to take the lead in being an anchor supporter of mental health research and treatment; Bell’s approach – getting people to talk about it – aligns with what the company does for a living.

One in five Canadians will suffer from a mental illness at some point in their lives, but it is something that most of us avoid talking about.

I’d like you to support this initiative. Visit Bell’s website for more information or check out the press release. And on Wednesday – Let’s talk.

The Ottawa Citizen ran a sloppily researched and unbalanced story Tuesday night after the CRTC released its first quarterly report on ITMP complaints. It was the subject of my post called Statistical Insignificance. The story looked at the CRTC’s report and concluded there had been a “sharp jump”, a “public outcry” and cited Michael Geist saying the numbers represented a “big spike in complaints.”

Problem was, nobody looked at the numbers. The story’s writer compared the fourth quarter complaints (27) with the total number of complaints over a two year period since the ITMP rules were in place (59) and presumed that this represented a 400% increase, a figure that a Financial Post editor used to justify its headline of “skyrocketing” complaints when re-running the story. Another Financial Post story also referred to the mythical “sharp jump” in complaints.

The story even tried to explain the “big spike”:

In September 2011, the CRTC issued a bulletin announcing improved reporting practices for Internet complaints, which could be responsible for the recent spike in public concern.

None of the reporters, editors or expert commentators considered how the data in the previous period was distributed across the two years. I thought it would be unlikely to be even distribution, but apparently, no one bothered to ask the CRTC what the numbers looked like.

So I did.

The CRTC told me that there were 25 complaints in the period  July 1 to September 30.

Twenty five in the third quarter of 2011 versus 27 in the fourth quarter.

Skyrocketing, sharp jump, big spike?

The Ottawa Citizen used some pretty extreme terms – public outcry, sharp jump – after Michael Geist commented on the release of the CRTC’s quarterly report on Internet Traffic Management complaints. The Citizen quotes Professor Geist as saying “I think the public is more aware of the rules and the value of filing complaints because over the last three months in particular, we’ve seen a pretty big spike in complaints.”

Really? Let’s look at the numbers to see if the figures merit such terms.

According to the Citizen, the CRTC reported that it received 41 ITMP-related complaints in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 67 complaints in the prior two years. The article ignored the fact that the CRTC ruled that a third of the complaints in 4Q11 were misdirected (the CRTC classified 14 of the 41 as non-ITMP related and, in some cases, referred the complaints to the CCTS). So the real numbers are 27 ITMP complaints compared to 59 in the prior 2 year period. We do not know the timing of the complaints within that 2 year period, so people have implicitly assumed that the complaints were evenly distributed in that period.

More importantly, we need perspective on the magnitude of these numbers.

There are close to ten and a half million residential internet connections in Canada. That is right: 10.5 million. Twenty seven complaints works out to 0.00026%. That is in the same order of magnitude of the odds of being struck by lightning. Twenty seven complaints in a three month period from 10 million customers can hardly be called a sharp spike, let alone be evidence of a public outcry.

If 6 people gathered to protest in front of Toronto City Hall, would we call that a public outcry? If a year earlier, only 1 person had been at the City Hall protest, would we say that the 6 people represented a “pretty big spike in complaints”? Those are the kind of numbers we’re talking about.

The fact that a third of the complaints were non-ITMP related is hardly a sign that the public is more aware of the rules. Indeed, the percentage of non-ITMP complaints appears to be rising, which may indicate that recent education efforts are failing.

The significance of the report from the CRTC wasn’t worth much more than a tweet. It is the start of the Commission’s reporting; I look forward to starting to see more quarterly data before I would suggest there are any trends.