Yesterday morning, I picked up the phone and called an aunt who lives halfway around the world. We chatted for about 15 minutes – the call is going to cost me less than the cup of coffee I sipped while we spoke.

In the course of our conversation I found out something new about my aunt. She had travelled between Canada and Europe by ship 60 years ago – aboard the Empress of Canada and Empress of Scotland, 2 members of the fleet of ocean liners operated by Canadian Pacific. She went off for some travel after she finished school, before she got married.

The conversation made me think about my kids travelling. They fly and I can track their flight’s location on-line. We generally make sure that the kids have a cell phone that allows us to stay in touch and we can see their photos nearly instantly.

In my aunt’s day, a 3 minute call between Europe and Canada was a luxury reserved for urgent news. To this day, we start our calls with an announcement that everyone is allright – and no special lifecycle announcements. I can call just to say hi.

I don’t take any of this for granted.

Some people ask whether we are too connected, are we “on” too much? They suggest a nostalgic look back in time and tell us that our parents did just fine without all of this technology.

I don’t think that ‘just fine’ is good enough. Maybe our parents did ‘just fine’. But we are doing better than that. We can call around the world for a lower price than calling from Toronto to Waterloo just 20 years ago. In real, not adjusted, dollars. We can stay in touch when travelling. We can share our experiences easier – so that it doesn’t come as a surprise to our nieces and nephews that their aunt or uncle was a globe-trotter. And we can respond faster to emergencies.

Our parents generation may have managed just fine with letters and airmail, but we are managing even better with our current portfolio of communications capabilities. 

I won’t take it for granted.

The CRTC has approved Atop Broadband’s application to provide TV services to the Toronto area.

This isn’t the first time that Toronto has seen alternative choices for broadcast distribution undertakings (the official term for a cable company). But it may be the first time we have seen a BDU that plans to deliver its services using over-the-top IPTV.

Atop has said that it expects to be able to deliver multiple HD streams using 2 Mbps per channel. That will lead to almost 1GB per hour per channel. In my household, using Atop as my TV provider would blow out my download cap in a good fall weekend of football and baseball playoffs.

So how will they compete?

Atop says that it has several strategic alliances that will overcome internet “access issues”. Maybe Atop plans to work with one of the alternate ISPs that has colocation space in many of the central offices.

Most importantly, Atop’s plans sends a new signal that there are ways for service providers to deliver high bandwidth services to customers. There is going to be increased choice for TV services.

Perhaps customers and other companies will realize that there are more choices for internet access than they have been led to believe. It isn’t a monopoly marketplace out there and it is encouraging to see entrepreneurs investing in delivering more choice to consumers.

Welcome to the market, Atop Broadband.

Parents in Meaford Ontario are calling for the removal of WiFi from their kids’ school. A press release issued by one of the members of the school’s Parent Council says that this is the first Canadian Public School to vote to remove WiFi. Only a third of the 210 letters sent home were returned; 62 of the 70 parents completing the survey wanted the school WiFi shut off.

The school principal has said that it is not taking that action until it is instructed to do so by the Board of Education.

In June, I wrote about concerns with the City of San Francisco intervening in mobile services regulation:

One of the reasons that I enjoy watching World Cup soccer is that is provides such a wonderful metaphor for organizational excellence. Unlike the games we see at neighbourhood parks, players at the top tier don’t converge on the moving ball. The panoramic camera angles show the choreography as team members back away and trust their mates to defend or attack, pass and dance around the field. Players know their jobs and they know what the roles are for the other members of the team.

Government bodies, at all levels, need to know their own job and trust their team mates to do the same. You can’t perform at a world class level if you can’t get each player to understand this. The consumer labelling and information requirements of the San Francisco ordinance isn’t what troubles me; it is the dysfunctional balkanization of regulatory authority that the ordinance represents.

A school council can and should express parental concerns. But its governance is not equipped to make the decisions on WiFi safety. It is about 5 levels of government away from the people who have that mandate and responsibility at the Federal level.

Do we want school parent councils making decisions on school vaccination programs?

Why do so many hate their communications service providers?

The feeling comes to the fore whenever a comparative report shows that we have the world’s priciest this or the world’s lowest that. Playing to a popular view, academics and analysts alike fail to look at the data to see if it passes reasonableness tests (what I like to call the smell test).

The latest entry to attract attention is a study [pdf, 130KB] from New America Foundation. Using a sample size of one (a single calling plan from Rogers), the study says that Canadians suffer from paying the highest mobile phone rates in the world. Had anyone looked at the footnotes, they would readily see that the Canadian pricing appears to have been overstated – doubled, in fact: the sampled 250 minute plan includes a ‘double minutes option’, among other call volume options (such as My5 Canada-wide, Unlimited Rogers calling, etc. That means that at worst case, a customer would get 500 minutes for the CAD$40 price, not the base 250 that apparently was used by the study.

I won’t comment on where the corrected amount would place Canada in the rankings, because I am left with no confidence that the other countries were correctly sampled either.

Why didn’t any of the smart people who tweeted the links to New America Foundation pick up on this pretty obvious error?

We see a new campaign from Mobilicity that is looking to capitalize on the negative feelings that so many Canadians have for their service provider. Mobilicity has invited Canadians to share their “mobile bill horror story” with a contest called FMyBill.

So why do so many Canadians hate their wireless service providers? And our internet companies. And our phone and cable companies.

The service providers have worked hard to develop bundles to entice customers to get everything from one company. Many Canadians have chosen to get multiple products from their service providers – that would usually be seen as a vote of confidence in the relationship.

So, why do we love to hate them so much?

The past few days have seen some activity to advance Canada’s national innovation agenda.

Action is overdue.

On Wednesday, a concise report was issued by the Coalition for Action on Innovation in Canada, co-chaired by former Industry Minister John Manley and GlaxoSmithKline CEO Paul Lucas, setting out 10 recommendations “to remove the barriers holding Canada back from taking its rightful place as a leader on the world innovation stage.”

The “Ten Steps Toward a More Innovative Canada” are:

1. Reform tax support for research and development;
2. Expand the pool of risk capital;
3. Adopt the world’s strongest intellectual property regime;
4. Strengthen business-academic links;
5. Tap private-sector expertise when spending public money;
6. Speed adoption of innovative products and services;
7. Launch a National Learning and Innovation Initiative;
8. Seek out the best and brightest;
9. Nurture and strengthen innovation clusters; and,
10. Ensure ongoing advocacy for innovation.

Yesterday, the government announced the creation of a Research and Development Expert Panel chaired by Tom Jenkins of Open Text.

The panel will conduct a comprehensive review of all existing federal support for businessR&D to see how this support could be enhanced to make sure federal investments are effective and delivering maximum results for Canadians.

With strong representation on the panel from academia, the panel may be suited to address a number of points emerging from the Manley / Lucas report. It is to report back to the Minister of State (Science and Technology) in one year with its recommendations “to enhance Canadian business innovation.”

In the meantime, our trading partners aren’t standing still. The EU has an initiative called Innovation Union,

It aims to improve conditions and access to finance for research and innovation in Europe, to ensure that innovative ideas can be turned into products and services that create growth and jobs.

European Voice observed that the EU is experiencing the same innovation gap that concerns us in Canada. The Innovation Union initiative includes over 30 action points.

We’ll want to watch the process undertaken by the R&D Expert Panel to gather advice from individual Canadians, entrepreneurs and business leaders. The report from the Coalition for Action on Innovation in Canada is a good start to the discussion.

The name of the coalition says it: Canada needs to move quickly from talk to action on innovation.