The ITU has released its latest report on the state of the information society around the world [pdf, 4.28MB].

There is a lot of information in there to be digested, but for now, let me highlight a couple observations.

The first point that I found interesting was a table in Annex 3, that is the basis for computing the IDI – defined as the ICT Development Index. In passing, allow me to applaud the ITU for its use of a SRT: a Secondary Recursive TLA: a rarely used three letter acronym that embeds a second TLA within it.

In that Annex 3 table, we can see that in 2008, Canada had computers in 80% of our households and broadband in 75.1% of the households. Assuming that households with computers would be the only ones that would subscribe to broadband service, it appears that close to 94% of Canadian households with computers had broadband service. As a comparison, Sweden has 87% of households equipped with computers, 84% with broadband. It seems to me that ensuring computer accessibility, through increased digital literacy and affordability, is one of the things that needs to be looked at when we try to increase broadband penetration.

Section 2 of the report has a couple important text boxes that speak about the challenges of international data comparisons. Box 2.1 talks about the importance of shifting to household survey data, using mobile penetration as an example of the distortions created by use of supply side data from operators.

Box 2.3 looks at specific limitations of international data comparisons, looking at the Korean and Japanese cases as examples.

‘International Internet bandwidth per user’ is another indicator where the performance of the Republic of Korea is relatively weak (ranked 58th globally). International bandwidth is low since Korean Internet users rely mainly on national bandwidth, available abundantly and at relatively low cost. Koreans have produced a large amount of national Internet content in local language and surf ‘at home’ (on web sites that are hosted within the country, not abroad), in their local language. The top twenty most popular Korean websites are all hosted in Korea. Few Koreans visit websites abroad due to language constraints.

The box doesn’t mention the anomaly for Korea with computer penetration (80.9%), yet 94.3% of households are reported as having broadband. Interesting?

Canada’s international bandwidth is most certainly understated since there is no mechanism by which cross-border connections can accurately be counted. In addition, to what extent do domestic sites satisfy the needs of francophones, similar to Korea’s domestic content producers.

As the ITU report itself cautions:

These data issues make international comparisons difficult and prevent policy makers from truly assessing the development of the information society.

There is no substitute for applying critical thought to any set of simple metrics.

Digital issues will be covered with lots of critical thought at at The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit. Have you registered yet?

As I flipped through the National Post Saturday morning, my eyes were drawn to two stories placed on pages FP2 and FP3.

There is the conclusion of an article by Matt Hartley carrying a headline of “Canada’s privacy boss setting rules for the world,” describing Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart as “Global Web Cop”. The story talks about the success of Canada’s Privacy Commission in taking on social media titan Facebook and now anchoring a coalition of global colleagues to take on Google. In the story, she is quoted saying:

There’s a growing impatience among privacy regulatory authorities with the kind of behaviour that doesn’t take privacy regulation into account

Juxtapose this with a Q&A on the opposite page, interviewing Heather Reisman: “Booked for a big future.” Superimposed on a photo of Ms. Reisman is a quote from the interview: “The government realizes that you cannot put legislation on a digital business.”

There used to be a view that digital content could operate in an anarchistic environment. Perhaps it is less a situation that legislation cannot be imposed, and more a case of of what legislation should appropriately be applied.

Don’t miss the regulatory blockbuster, an annual highlight at The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit. Have you registered yet?

Over the past year or so, there have been a number of CRTC decisions and industry announcements related to enhanced emergency access (E-911) from mobile devices. In addition, there was a recent decision related to enhancing relay calling services, leveraging internet and other communications technologies in order to bring TTY based message relay services ahead from its 30 year old technology. This followed last July’s policy statement on accessibility for broadcast and telecom services.

On Wednesday, the CRTC authorized the industry technical consultation group to investigate a mash-up of these two capabilities: Improving access to emergency services for people with hearing and speech disabilities.

With this solution, when a pre-registered person with a hearing or speech disability initiates contact with a PSAP by dialing 9-1-1 on a cellphone, that person’s contact and location information would automatically be transmitted in the same way it is for other cellphone users, but the 9-1-1 call would be flagged as coming from a person with a hearing or speech disability. Upon receiving a flagged 9-1-1 call, the 9-1-1 operator would respond by sending an SMS text message to the caller, thus enabling the caller to text back and forth with the operator.

There will be progress reporting back to the CRTC every six months, while CISC investigates the viability with wireless carriers, 9-1-1 service providers, and the public safety community.

A lot of people have trouble with statistics.

I learned that first hand teaching statistics at a university level.

But it also became evident with the way a bunch of reports have misinterpretted reports from Akamai’s State of the Internet for 4Q09 [pdf, 2.28MB]. A number of people are reporting that the internet is slowing down because of the iPhone, based on observations by Akamai about a decline in average internet access speed in Korea.

we believe that [the iPhone] launch was likely responsible for the significant drop in South Korea’s average observed connection speed in the fourth quarter.

As an example, Bill St. Arnaud says that indicates a “desperate need for 5G networks.”

There are several reports of how Internet traffic is being slowed down because of the huge growth in mobile data traffic from devices like the iPhone. Mobile data now exceeds mobile voice in terms of traffic volume.

I think that these reports are misunderstanding the impact of the iPhone and mobile devices on Korean and other networks. It is wrong to interpret these results as internet traffic being slowed down because of a growth in mobile data.

This isn’t an issue of capacity and there isn’t a slowing down of conventional internet access. Instead, it appears to be a statistical anomaly caused by a surge in internet access from slower speed devices. The average is being pulled down by the growth in internet demand from slower speed forms of access – but that does not mean that the internet is being slowed down. Nor does it mean that people are getting anything less than fully satisfactory service quality from these slower speed mobile devices and networks.

If anything, the massive growth in mobile data is an indicator of overwhelming user satisfaction. That is why people are continuing to buy smart phones and using their devices more and more.

On Monday, Michael Hennessy posted a tweet that pointed to a piece in the Financial Times called “Net Neutrality: Time for Evidence-Based Policy”.

In that article, Thomas Hazlett exposes a significant flaw in a NY Times OpEd penned by University of Michigan academic (and former special assistant to President Obama) Susan Crawford.

Obama economic adviser Susan Crawford, arguing in the New York Times for broadband re-regulation, said that ending government DSL mandates was “a radical move… [that] produced a wave of mergers,” raising prices and lowering quality.

It is simply untrue.

Read the pieces.

That same day, I was bothered by a statement in a CANARIE press release issued to talk about University of Toronto digitizing half a million books for the Internet Archive:

The University of Toronto library team sends approximately one terabyte of data, in the form of scanned books, per day to the Internet Archive via the CANARIE network. A terabyte is one trillion bytes of data, equivalent to 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. This data transfer would not be possible on the commercial Internet, as the size of these files would take up too much bandwidth and potentially bring down the network.

I was struck by this statement. CANARIE has a fraction of the capacity of a number of the commercial national networks in Canada. There are commercial applications that are sending those volumes of data every day.

With the downturn in the traditional media sector, we don’t seem to see enough attention being paid to checking facts the way they did in the ‘old days’. It means that readers have to be more vigilant in challenging sources.