A new year. A fresh start. What should be the telecom priorities for the year ahead?

Driving internet availability and adoption need to be at the top of any list. The government has said that Canada’s future depends on connectivity. The CRTC set an objective in 2016 for 90% of Canadian homes to have access to a 50/10 unlimited broadband plan by 2021. The Commission reports that 91.7% had such access and Canada is on target to achieve universal access by 2031.

Still, there is a big difference between having universal access to broadband, and attaining universal adoption of that service.

It is one thing to have access to a service, but something quite different to get people to sign on. Think of it as that old “lead a horse to water” kind of thing. How do we get them to drink?

I have written before that “Connections are easy; Adoption isn’t.” Connectivity is a relatively simple engineering problem. Throw enough money at a construction problem and there can be a solution.

Driving universal adoption is a lot more complex. For most people, it is difficult to imagine why anyone wouldn’t get online if their home has access to broadband. That is why there has usually been an assumption that price must be the factor. As I have written before, “Too many people superficially think that increasing adoption is simply a matter of lower prices, but research has shown there are far more factors involved.” In “The broadband divide’s little secret”, I wrote “after introducing Connected for Success, Internet for Good, Connecting Families and other targeted programs, we have learned that getting people online isn’t just a matter of price.”

Hopefully, 2023 will begin to bring better research into understanding those factors inhibiting broadband adoption among different groups in order to develop appropriate responses. It is fertile ground for academic research.

A lot more work needs to be done to address hate and illegal content on the internet, a topic that came to the fore last summer when the public learned about the government funding a notorious purveyor of hate to develop an anti-racism program for Canadian broadcasters. (You can’t make these things up.) For more than 15 years, I have been writing about this issue. The government is exploring new legislation but I am not yet convinced that this is the appropriate approach. Add this to the 2023 agenda.

Online hate ties to an overall theme of online safety. These factors can impact adoption among people who have been wary to get connected. Can we develop techniques to improve privacy and online safety and security to improve confidence for all?

Those are a few of the items that top my 2023 agenda.

What would you add?

Which of my blog posts attracted the most attention in 2022?

Looking at the analytics, these 5 articles had the most individual page views:

1. “Feeding at the funding trough” [August 25, 2022]
2. “Funding hate” [July 26, 2021]
3. “Government funded hate speech” [August 15, 2022]
4. “Purveying hate on the public dime” [April 20, 2022]
5. “Canada ranks 9th for quality, availability & cost of internet” [May 30, 2022]

Honourable mentions go to:

• “My summer vacation” [August 30, 2022]
• “Truthiness and Canada’s telecom industry” [March 1, 2022]

Clearly, there has been much interest from a new group of readers driving four of the top five articles.

Which of my posts resonated most with you?

Thank you for following me here on this blog and on Twitter, and thank you for engaging online and by phone over the past year.

Unfortunately, Twitter has decided to discontinue its support of Revue, the engine that has powered my weekly newsletter, with its digest of the previous week’s blog posts. I will let you know if I decide to migrate to another platform.

I hope the coming holiday period provides an opportunity to connect with your family and friends. Let me reiterate my very best wishes for health, happiness and peace in the year ahead.

Another year is about to go into the history books.

Long time readers know that I have used lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game for my year-end wrap for more than a decade. Last year’s post was entitled “Then the child moved ten times round the seasons”, so this year I’ll finish that stanza:

Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like, ‘When you’re older’ must appease him
And promises of ‘someday’ make his dreams

I was never one who was appeased by such statements, even when I was younger. I didn’t have the patience to put up with “when you’re older” back then, and especially not now that I am well into that state of “older”. I commented last year that my age may be contributing to an increased level of impatience with the sometimes glacial paces of activity in certain areas of our government.

As Canadians witnessed this year in our passport offices, and at our airports, there has been a lack of leadership driving operational excellence from too many branches of our public service. It’s as though executives in the government bureaucracy are satisfied with mediocrity. How else do we explain the hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses handed out last year in departments with such failures in service delivery?

How else do we explain the 5-week delay in getting a public statement from anyone in government associated with the Laith Marouf affair? Where is the accountability, not just for the injudiciousness of awarding an anti-racism contract to a purveyor of such hateful speech, but also for the failures to respond in a timely manner by multiple departments, including the Prime Minister’s Office? I have trouble imagining any reasonable excuse for the uncomfortably long silence, other than political operatives wishing it would all blow over.

Last week, I wrote “We can do better”, observing that actions (and inactions) by our political leadership are contributing to a normalization of antisemitism within mainstream society.

As I described in my blog post in early November, these episodes could have left me profoundly disappointed. Still, each of these failures can be viewed as representing an opportunity for improvement. In the Toronto Star yesterday, Michael Levitt quoted the late Max Eisen saying, “In the face of racism, you must not be a bystander but an upstander and speak out against hate”. He continued, suggesting there can be no better New Year’s resolution for all of us.

In the coming year, I am also convinced that we can be doing more to understand and address the factors that are impacting digital adoption, as I discussed last week.

As we approach 2023, I will keep driving ahead because I know we can do better on files like these. We have to do better.

The promises of ‘someday’ make my dreams.

Every so often, I think back to the denouement in Jeff Daniels’ monologue at the opening of The Newsroom:

We stood up for what was right! We fought for moral reasons, we passed and struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn’t belittle it; it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn’t scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed.

Being well informed is an important prerequisite for responsible leaders.

Helping you stay informed is one of the reasons I added more than 120 blog posts to “Telecom Trends” over the course of 2022, on average continuing to write more than 2 posts per week, a pace 50% higher than pre-pandemic levels. There are more than 3160 posts in the archives (fully searchable).

Through this blog, it is my objective to be a source of quality information on Canadian telecom policy, with occasional gastronomical diversions. In each case, I am trying to share elements of my expertise accumulated over decades. One look at my profile and you’ll realize that you can’t get a physique like mine overnight.

I look forward to continuing to engage with you in the New Year.

I wish you and your families a happy, healthy, safe and peaceful holiday season.

I missed this multinational press release, issued by the US, Australia, Canada and the UK when it was first issued last week and I thought it would be worthwhile bookmarking it here on my blog.

The UK characterizes the release as the other countries signing up to the UK’s “vision” for a stronger 5G supply chain. “Australia, Canada and the United States have backed guidelines for telecoms companies, developed by the UK, designed to build a more innovative, competitive and secure supply of equipment for telecoms networks, including for 5G and 6G.”

The four principles are:

1. Open disaggregation, allowing elements of the RAN to be sourced from different suppliers and implemented in new ways.
2. Standards-based compliance, allowing all suppliers to test solutions against standards in an open, neutral environment.
3. Demonstrated interoperability, ensuring disaggregated elements work together as a fully functional system – at a minimum matching the performance and security of current solutions.
4. Implementation neutrality, allowing suppliers to innovate and differentiate on the features and performance of their products.

This joint statement sets out the initiatives that will seek to guide our shared efforts on telecommunications supplier diversity, building on the 2021 Prague Proposals and the Open RAN Principles:

1. Information sharing
   We plan to continue to share information on our respective policy approaches to telecommunications supplier diversity and encourage information sharing between our respective testing and research facilities, such as the UK’s SmartRAN Open Network Interoperability Centre (SONIC) and state-of-the-art UK Telecommunications Lab, Australia’s ‘Secure-G’ Connectivity Lab, once operational, and the Communications Research and Innovation Network of the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences.
2. A complementary approach to research and development (R&D)
   We expect to take a complementary and cooperative approach to telecommunications R&D that promotes alignment of priorities and objectives, ensuring that our combined respective R&D approaches together form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. This could include R&D partnerships, bringing together the brightest minds and most innovative entrepreneurs of each country to develop world-class open networks.
3. Ensuring strong security
   We have a shared view that open and interoperable architectures should be secure. Security should be a core consideration throughout the entire lifecycle of relevant components and systems, including in the design, development, deployment, operation and decommissioning stages. We intend to proactively address any concerns while these architectures develop. Sufficient vendor participation, transparency and openness in Open RAN standards enable security researchers to identify and address potential issues rapidly as they arise. Examples of state-of-the-art facilities aiming to test and improve the security of open and interoperable systems include the UK Telecommunications Lab and Australian ‘Secure-G’ Connectivity Lab.
4. Supporting transparency in standards
   We intend to work together to encourage transparency in industry-led standards-setting processes to ensure that overall security is enhanced by open practices despite the opening up of additional interfaces. The onus and responsibility to lead standards development is with industry, but governments should be supporting and enabling these efforts. Transparent standards development is crucial to allow independent review to identify and resolve potential issues, ensuring that standards are built upon best practices.
5. Avoiding fragmentation
   We encourage industry to avoid fragmentation of the nascent market by focusing on the smallest possible number of options for disaggregation, which still allows the neutral implementation of secure and performant networks. This suggests a focus on developing the necessary number of specifications, splits, standards, and standards bodies to promote interoperability and security, without unduly limiting market-based innovation. This should have the dual benefits of accelerating progress and reducing complexity for entrants, as set out in the 2021 Prague Proposals. This extends to proactively negating fragmentation at the system level—avoiding so-called ‘islands of interoperability’ only between partnered vendors, systems integrators and hardware suppliers—to ensure genuine Open RAN, as per the principle of ‘Implementation neutrality.’
6. Working with international partners
   Telecommunications supplier diversity is a global issue and will require a collaborative approach from the international community. We plan to, therefore, coordinate our efforts when engaging with international stakeholders and fora, to share and implement best practices, and to work together to tackle shared policy challenges. We intend to seek the ongoing support from other like-minded countries to truly realize the benefits of a diverse telecommunications supply chain on a global scale.

The preamble to the joint release says that the four countries “are committed to ensuring the security and resilience of our telecommunications networks, including by fostering a diverse supply chain and influencing the development of future telecommunications technologies such as 6G.”

Despite a difference in temperature of more than 20 degrees, it’s good to be back home.

Sure, I could get used to the weather in Israel. They call winter the “rainy season”, but keep some perspective as to what they are comparing: it simply does not rain, drizzle or think of precipitation between April and September.

And when the winter precipitation falls, you don’t have to shovel it.

I have always liked to eat local when I travel. The food scene in Israel is fabulous. Local fruit and vegetables are available year-round and there are still distribution networks to have field ripened produce delivered to corner markets daily.

It’s a Mediterranean country, so many of my favourite fish dishes are fresh from the sea. For kosher eaters like me, there are choices that are unparalleled. This led me to frequently digress on my Twitter feed, showcasing my dietary feed.

So, thank you to my Twitter followers who have indulged me for the past 4 weeks while I over-indulged myself.

Back to telecom.

We used Canadian carrier roaming for one of our lines and used a local SIM for the other (easier for people to call a local phone number).

As I have written before, Israel’s low mobile prices come with a high cost: compared to Canada, the networks are awful. Coverage is weak in many areas, even in urban centres and most of the time, our phones were operating in 3G, periodically transitioning to 4G. Even then, the connection delivered painfully slow data speeds. According to Ookla Speed test, Israel ranked 69th in the world for median Mobile speed in October (29.6 Mbps down) compared to Canada which was ranked two and a half times faster at 74.49 Mbps. Neither of our lines even came close to the Ookla medians, even though we were usually in Israel’s 3rd largest city.

There has to be a middle ground for mobile and telecom policy, encouraging investment in coverage and deployment of advanced infrastructure, while applying measures to ensure universal affordability.

It is surprising (and perhaps somewhat disappointing) that various levels of government in Canada have not done more to explore targeted affordability measures for telecom services based on income. Notably, I distinguish between the popularity of generally lower prices – we all want to pay less for everything – contrasted with why I would consider to be real affordability, the inability to buy a product or service that one requires to participate in today’s environment.

No matter how low average prices fall, there will be disadvantaged segments that cannot afford even the most basic, entry level services. We need to find a solution.

Government funding programs have targeted geography without regard to income. The federal government’s 25% reduction in general mobile prices did little to improve genuine affordability for lower income Canadians. In both of these instances, one can see the political benefit of the program, but I am not convinced these approaches have delivered sufficient benefits for those who need the most help.

The industry stepped up on its own to create affordability programs for fixed broadband. There is still much more work to be done to address digital literacy and other issues that impede adoption of new technologies.

Perhaps the coming year will see the government look at funding a targeted mobile affordability initiative, and develop programs to study and address non-price related factors.

It’s good to be back.