Like many Canadians, I may be over-insured. I have extended warranties on my car, I have maintenance agreements for my home appliances and heating. Last year, I bought an extended warranty for my computer when it was nearing the end of its first year.

At that time, my battery wouldn’t hold a charge and I was surprised to find that HP covered its replacement; many companies consider rechargeable batteries to be consumables. I rewarded HP’s support group with an extended maintenance agreement. 

Last week, the machine refused to start up. HP’s support centre diagnosed the problem in a matter of minutes, but warned me that the data on the hard drive might be wiped in the recovery process if it as more than the motherboard, so they advised getting a back-up before sending off the PC.

I did that, so as a result, I didn’t ship my notebook until Monday. The support centre estimated 7-10 days so I wasn’t expecting to see the computer come back until next week. I imagine that this would have allowed for the possibility of out-of-stock parts and it seemed reasonable. In fact, the computer was returned with a new motherboard 48 hours later and all of my files remained intact.

I love seeing companies exceed expectations. Especially when I am at the receiving end.

The CRTC has set the pricing for the usage sensitive component for wholesale internet service.

In Decision 2011-44, the Commission determined that smaller Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will get a 15% discount off the major carriers’ retail usage sensitive rates when the ISPs subscribe to telco gateway access services or cable third-party internet access.

In an interview yesterday, I said that I don’t think this means the end of smaller ISPs. The ISPs have had a lot of time to prepare for this decision, the last component needed to implement usage sensitive billing. The better ISPs have looked at ways to evolve their business model and network configuration.

UBB does not mean the end of flat rate internet, but to be successful, ISPs will have to know more about their customers and work hard to balance their customer mix. Internet service is joining the rest of telecommunications services that have both fixed and variable wholesale cost components.

Long distance prices may have come down dramatically, but there is still a marginal cost for every call you make. Still, there are a number of companies that offer flat rate plans, unlimited calling province-wide, nation-wide, North America or even to many countries overseas. How can they do this?

An all you can eat buffet owner has to balance their customer load; the restaurant needs to attract some patrons that don’t subscribe to the plate loading antics of the high school football players that are also regular customers. I wrote last week that ISPs need to know more about their customers and who they want to attract.

It may be counter-intuitive, but the result should be that consumers will see more differentiation between ISPs as they stake out their turf.

Momentum is building around the idea that Canada needs more homes equipped with computers.

The Wire Report had an article last week entitled: Computer ownership an obstacle to broadband uptake, data shows. The article quoted my blog post from two weeks ago:

One Laptop Per Child set out to provide the world’s poorest children with a connected laptop computer. Shouldn’t all Canadian children be comparably (if not better) equipped?

That post said that we need a million computers to bring Canada’s lowest income households to parity. I want to start with homes with school-aged children.

The story is told about a guy who went fishing on a remote lake with dynamite. He was doing pretty well until someone stopped him and said “You know you can’t fish with dynamite. I have to report you to the authorities.” The guy lit another stick and handed it to the intervenor and said “Are we gonna talk or we gonna fish?”

I got together with some colleagues last night to discuss how we might move forward. We want to pull together a broad coalition of people. Who wants to fish?

Saturday’s Globe had a feature about telephone companies “frontal attack on cable.”

In the article, Bell CEO George Cope refers to Shaw, Rogers and Videotron’s 6.4 million cable TV customers as “the last monopoly.”

There are innovative capabilities enabled by IPTV and Microsoft has been powering the solutions being deployed by both Bell and TELUS. Shaw’s Peter Bisonnette observed that most of the differentiation to date has been based on price.

As the telephone companies continue to invest in their urban infrastructure, pushing fibre deeper toward their customers, the opportunities for delivering IPTV increase. Cable companies are continuing to upgrade their capabilities as well, investing in innovation, leveraging their existing outside plant.

It won’t be long until most Canadians can choose between 2 wired service providers on top of the wireless and satellite choices. Most of the carriers in Canada now have phone, TV, internet and mobile operations, leading to interesting service delivery capabilities.

The 2011 Canadian Telecom Summit will examine these exciting developments in a number of sessions, including the closing panel on Thursday, June 2 that examines the explosion of the multi-screen universe: Tablets, TVs and Smartphones, oh my! The conference opens on May 31 with a keynote address by Rogers Communications President Rob Bruce.

Early bird rates are available for the next 5 weeks. Have you registered yet?

ISPs restructuring their pricing plans may be missing opportunities to learn from the past.

Long time Canadian telecom industry watchers will remember Integrated Network Services, Inc. (Insinc), a data services company that was acquired by Sprint Canada in the mid 1990’s. Insinc owned no transmission facilities of its own, yet it won the RFP for the original CA*net in 1989-90, partnering with IBM. Insinc leased facilities from CNCP and Stentor.

As a competitive differentiator, Insinc offered a mean time to repair (MTTR) of only 2 hours and backed it up with credits if a repair took longer. The underlying carriers offered a 4 hour MTTR. How could Insinc offer a better repair time than the carriers? Insinc looked at the data for repair times and they structured their customer agreements leveraging that deep understanding of the business.

At the time, repair times were actually bi-modal: a lot of repairs were effected by quick resets; most of the rest took much, much longer, requiring field dispatch and possible splicing. In other words, a significant share of the troubles were dealt with in a matter of minutes, while the rest took much longer than 4 hours. So Insinc would miss roughly the same percentage of repairs whether the commitment was 2 hours or 4 hours. By commiting to an MTTR of half the time of their suppliers / competitors, Insinc was able to build up an attractive portfolio of business.

What brought this to mind was a reading of a column last week in the Toronto Star. A customer who apparently uses less than 2GB per month was complaining that she is going to receive less from her service provider when they change her unlimited internet plan to one with a 25 GB download cap. How is she getting less service?

At the same time, her service provider could have saved itself the publicity had it looked at the usage data in advance. Was there really a need to impose a 25 GB cap on a customer using less than 2 GB?