Getting ready to fly back to Canada, I can reflect on some international communications experiences. I have been overseas for the past week visiting my daughter. It has been interesting to travel in a country that enjoys mobile penetration of more than 140%, despite prices that appear to be in the same order of magnitude as ours in Canada. My daughter’s voice and data plan is around $70 per month, which takes about 3 and a half hours to earn. Her plan includes 1 GB of data, with extra charges for more. She is shopping for a better plan, no different from her friends back in Toronto.

Mobile phones are everywhere and competition appears to be vibrant, with number portability and switching incentives. But using any measure of affordability, prices are much, much higher as a share of local wages. So, the local government is taking steps to add more competitors to the marketplace.

While most areas have solid connectivity, 3.5G is not prevalent and no one is talking about LTE.

I kept connected with a local SIM card, in part to avoid roaming charges, but mainly so that friends and family over here would have a local number that they would call. Generally, I have used WiFi to connect my Blackberry and PC, thanks to open coffee shop networks.

While the grass always seems greener elsewhere, it has been worthwhile looking beyond raw penetration numbers and arbitrary price baskets to see how people are using their means of communications.

Like many travellers, I have done my part to drive up international mobile penetration rates. I have SIM cards for the UK, the US and a couple other countries where family members travel frequently enough to keep the numbers active. It is an option available that makes it easier for locals to reach me when I am in their country and save money when I am making local calls.

Much has been written about international mobile roaming prices – keep in mind that Europeans cross into other countries more frequently than we Canadians travel inter-provincially. So it is not uncommon for people to carry multiple SIMs in order to arbitrage various rate plans.

I hope you have had time to unwind with family this summer. I’m going to be taking one last break – exercising some international roaming this week – before getting back to work after Labour Day, starting to put together the preliminary program for The 2012 Canadian Telecom Summit, taking place June 4-6, 2012 in Toronto. Send us a note if you want to get sponsorship information or to propose a speaker or a panel discussion theme for one of the break-out sessions.

Another voice is calling for enhancing demand for a digital Canada. Today’s Globe and Mail has an interview with Google Canada chief Chris O’Neill who observes:

We estimate that there are roughly two million small businesses in this country, and less than half of them have a website. That is a problem [because] consumers are out there actively looking for what businesses offer, and it really is a missed opportunity.

He suggests that Canadians’ lower risk tolerance is part of the problem.

As I have written often on these pages, it is too easy to focus on the supply side – the networks – without enough time being given to looking at conditions that will stimulate demand. Increasing adoption of digital technologies, encouraging businesses to establish a web presence, attacking disincentives for private sector investment.

What else should be part of Canada’s national digital strategy?

The CRTC has approved changes to the way the National Contribution Fund operates, reducing some of the paperwork required for smaller competitive phone companies.

The Canadian Portable Contribution Consortium (CPCC) had proposed raising the contribution eligible revenue threshold for requiring audited statements to $100M (from the current $50M). Also, all companies that currently receive a local phone subsidy are required to provide audited figures; CPCC proposed requiring audits only if the level of subsidy will exceed $0.5M in a given year. Companies that do not exceed the audit thresholds are only required to file an affidavit attesting to the accuracy of their figures.

Finally, the CPCC has incorporated standardized audit requirements by reference to the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA), thereby ensuring that its requirements are kept consistent with CICA on an ongoing basis, rather than needing future amendments to be approved by the CRTC.

Telecom Decision CRTC 2011-529 includes a copy of the complete procedures guide. The changes provide welcome relief to the costs of regulatory compliance.

How can the CRTC regulate landlords, who aren’t carriers?

The issue has come up in the past when dealing with access agreements for wireline telecommunications services and broadcast television distribution. In 1999, the CRTC decided on a clear demarcation point for inside wiring so that tenants could subscribe to competitive telecom services [Decision 99-10]. Decision 2003-45 provided additional guidelines for negotiation of building access agreements.

But the CRTC has limited powers in regulating building owners or property managers. Instead, it uses indirect regulation – such as finding that an agreement between a regulated carrier and the unregulated party (such as a landlord) contravenes the Telecom Act or Broadcast Act – as it did in 2007 with the dispute over access by Shaw to buildings developed by Concord Pacific.

So this brings us to the case of San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (the BART). Of course, the CRTC doesn’t regulate San Francisco, but it would be helpful to discuss whether such a case would contravene Canadian telecom regulations. Here is some background. it is increasingly common for landlords to install a distributed antenna system (DAS) for improving wireless connectivity inside highrise buildings or shopping centres or subway systems, for cellular, WiFi, internal mobile radio and first responders. Some DAS (such as Optiway) are multi-frequency and have sophisticated management capabilities. It is not uncommon for the DAS to be carrier independent and be owned by the landlord or managed on the landlord’s behalf.

On July 11, (as explained here by BART) the San Francisco subway system disrupted cellular access inside their subway tunnels because it believed that mobile services within their system would otherwise be used to incite illegal activity. For various viewpoints on the legality or correctness of this, see Public Knowledge and Public CEO (Public CEO asks the question of whether access to cellular service is an absolute right).

So, to return to the Canadian context, would Toronto Transit violate any laws if it did the same thing in the same circumstances? Or what about a major shopping centre? Or an office building temporarily cutting its distributed antennae in the food court?

To add some colour to the discussion, what if the landlord got into a dispute with just one carrier and disconnected their access to the interconnection point? Or refused to interconnect with other carriers?

Are Distributed Antenna Systems a form of “telecommunications facility” and are there conditions under which a building owner would become a telecommunications common carrier under the Telecom Act?