As this post gets published, I should be landing in Moscow, en route to the Baikonur Kosmodrome, to watch the launch of Xplornet’s 4G satellite.

On Friday, I wrote about how this new satellite is designed to bring faster and more affordable broadband connections to more Canadians in rural and remote areas, those who live and work beyond the reach of terrestrial facilities.

Xplornet is also making significant investments in regional infrastructure to support connectivity to its satellites. Last week, Xplornet announced the successful completion of a multi-million dollar 4G satellite ground station near Fort McMurray, Alberta. Xplornet is Alberta’s leading provider of rural broadband service. The Fort McMurray gateway announcement comes on the heels of a similar facility being completed near St. John’s.

This week’s launch of Viasat-1 will be streamed live. Early next year, a second 4G satellite, Jupiter, will be launched to complete the coverage. Xplornet is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Canada to bridge the urban/rural broadband divide.

This week’s launch should be celebrated by all who have been working to advance Canada’s digital agenda.

Some of the initial write-ups of Bell’s 4 screen coverage of the Montreal Canadiens suggested that we are seeing a test of the CRTC’s new Vertical Integration rules.

I disagree.

Recall that the CRTC said:

Following its examination of consolidation in the broadcasting industry, the CRTC has decided to:

• …
• Allow companies to offer exclusive programming to their Internet or mobile customers provided that it is produced specifically for an Internet portal or a mobile device. This includes supplementary programming such as behind-the-scenes video clips of a television program, as well as original content.

From the Bell press release:

“Bell customers now have preferred access to new HabsTV videos on the screen of their choice, whenever and wherever they want.”

HabsTV goes behind the scenes with the players of hockey’s most celebrated team to offer Bell Mobility, Bell Fibe TV, Bell Satellite TV and Bell Internet customers special access to new video, broadcast twice a week.

The CRTC specifically identified “behind the scenes” as a permitted class of exclusive programming, so it is hard to see how this is “a test case on the CRTC’s new regulations for vertically integrated companies.” This does not appear to be content that was primarily made for broadcast TV.

Are we going to let companies compete in developing and offering enhanced value and differentiation to consumers, without calling for the regulator to interrupt each service to enter the marketplace?

I am off to Baikonur, Kazakhstan next week to watch the launch of Xplornet’s 4G satellite, designed to bring faster and more affordable broadband connections to more Canadians in rural and remote areas, beyond the reach of terrestrial facilities.

Xplornet has secured 100% of the Canadian Ka-band capacity on the Viasat-1 4th generation broadband satellite; it will use that entirely for rural broadband.

Together with the planned launch of a second, similar 4G satellite in 2012 and with its national fixed-wireless 4G network, Xplornet says it will effectively end Canada’s urban / rural digital-divide. ViaSat-1 can support customer download speeds of up to 25 Mbps. Its capacity is greater than the capacity of all current North American broadband satellites combined, with the ability to provide broadband service to 1.5 million customers in North America.

With the launch planned for Wednesday, Canada joins a group of other countries (including France, Germany, the UK, Australia and India) that have endorsed 4G satellite as the solution for ensuring universal access to affordable broadband. These next generation satellites deliver more than ten times the speed and capacity of current systems, at a much lower cost per customer.

I’m proud to be associated with the team at Xplornet and I look forward to sharing the excitement of next week’s launch with you. Be sure to monitor Xplornet’s countdown website for a live feed of the launch.

Statistics Canada released an interesting variant on its Internet Use Survey yesterday. Unlike its release from May which examined household use, yesterday’s numbers provide an indicator for individual usage for Canadians aged 16 and older. Both reports are for the same period.

Many of the stories I read focused on the regional differences in internet adoption – a phenomenon we have explored before for internet [such as here] and for mobile services.

There are subtle differences between the individual and household data that raised some interesting questions for me. For instance, in May we learned that 97% of households in the top income quartile had internet access, but yesterday we learned that only 94% of individuals in that quartile use the internet. On the other hand, 59% of individuals in the lowest income quartile use the internet, despite only 54% of the households having access. What is causing these discrepancies? Fewer individuals per household are on-line in upper income homes; the opposite in lower income households.

For the non-users, I like to read the excuses with a critical eye:

A majority of non-users (62%) said they did not use the Internet because they had no need or interest, did not find it useful, or did not have time. Over one-fifth (22%) mentioned a lack of skills or training, or that they found the Internet or computers too difficult to use. Limited access to a computer (12%), cost of service or equipment (9%) or age (9%) were other reasons cited for not going online.

In my view, almost all of these are euphemisms for “it’s the money.”

Yesterday’s report indicated that 88% of individuals in Halifax are online, versus 79% of Nova Scotia as a whole. Since the Halifax Census Metropolitan Area represents about 40% of the province, this means that the rest of the province has only about 73% of individuals using the internet. Why?

It is always important to look at the data and ask lots of questions. How do we increase adoption across geographies, ages, incomes, education and other demographic factors?

Can mission critical IT systems migrate to the cloud?

Information technology (IT) executives have to be reviewing their options as Research in Motion (RIM) enters its third day of service interruption. Amazon’s 3-day outage in April (and subsequent partial service loss in August) should have boards of directors asking CIOs to review their architectures.

Of course, cloud architectures can be more survivable than any single data centre, or single company networked operation. But these celebrated network failures should force an introspective process within  companies’ IT departments to ensure continuity strategies are consistent with the business objectives. All networks and systems will experience failures; anticipating and designing to survive the failure becomes a business decision.

To what extent are companies willing to lose control of the restoration process? This has to be the key frustration for corporate cloud services users today. When the CEO calls to find out the status, will the CIO be able to provide a credible answer?

Planning for The 2012 Canadian Telecom Summit is underway. We’ll explore Cloud Computing among other issues facing communications and information technology leaders today. Please get in touch to discuss how you can get involved in this year’s event – June 4-6, 2012 in Toronto.