A few weeks ago, I wrote about the last webinar of the year from the International Telecommunications Society, “Comparing International Approaches To Spectrum Policy” that took place last week (video reply is available here).

In the chat room, one of the attendees referred to a relatively recent GSMA report, “The impact of spectrum prices on consumers”, published in September 2019 [pdf, 2MB]. That report included these recommendations:

1. Maximising revenues from spectrum awards should no longer be a measure of success;
2. Auctions can deliver inefficient outcomes when poorly designed;
3. Artificially limiting the supply of spectrum, including through set-asides, risks slowing services and inflating prices;
4. Spectrum should be released to the market as soon as there is a business case for operators to use it;
5. Policymakers should work with stakeholders to enable timely, fair and effective spectrum licensing to the benefit of society

The webinar provided some valuable academic perspectives on various approaches to spectrum policy, examining factors that can impact consumer outcomes, such as prices, service quality and coverage.

There was an observation from Helaina Gaspard of University of Ottawa’s Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy that I found to be especially interesting: “Canada wants to improve connectivity but there is no policy mechanism, formal or informal, that assesses whether spectrum policy is delivering against the government’s overall objective for ubiquitous coverage”.

Indeed, shouldn’t we ensure that the outcomes of spectrum policy delivers against the theoretical objectives that form the basis of those policies? Whether it is set-asides, the choice of spectrum tiers or other conditions selected as part of the policy framework for each spectrum band, how do we measure success?

Many frequent followers know that I travel to Israel relatively frequently, and I have written about the entrepreneurial spirit that seems to permeate throughout the country, helping it build an innovation-based economy.

In 2016, I observed, “The book [Startup Nation], by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, examines how Israel – a country with about 25% of Canada’s population, in a constant state of war since its founding in 1948, with no natural resources – produces more start-up companies than larger nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada and the UK.”

That came to mind as I was scanning PitchBook’s recently published annual university rankings, that “compare schools by tallying up the number of alumni entrepreneurs who have founded venture capital-backed companies.”

The overwhelming majority of schools are from the United States, with Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, MIT and Pennsylvania taking the top 5 spots. Cornell, Michigan, Texas and Yale take positions 6, 8, 9 and 10, but Tel Aviv University stands in position 7. Technion – Israel Institute of Technology is in 15th position, with these two Israeli schools standing among an otherwise all-American top 20.

Canada’s University of Waterloo is ranked 21. Other Canadian universities in the top 100 are: McGill (26), Toronto (27), UBC (44), Queen’s (55), Western (91), York (98), and Concordia (100).

Other Israeli schools in the PitchBook 100: Hebrew University of Jerusalem (31), Reichmann University (38), Ben Gurion (45), and Bar Ilan (71).

What can Canadian schools learn from Israeli counterparts?

I was recently introduced to a new software application for communications services providers that uses machine learning to identify clusters of customers in need of special attention, in order to reduce churn and increase revenue.

Let me step back for a minute to provide some background.

I met Frederic Beauvais in the late 90’s when he was a young lawyer at Stikeman’s in Montreal. We did some work together and became friends. I remember asking him if Stikeman’s handled residential real estate, and he said, “Of course we do. How many thousand homes are you building.” He found a law clerk to help us buy our house. Whenever he called the house and reached my wife, he would lay on a thick French accent, although he otherwise speaks English to me and business associates with more of a mid-western diction. I always thought that wasn’t playing fair.

A few years later, Frederic moved from law into the world of investments, with a special focus on the telecom sector, and ended up being based in Paris.

For the past year and a half, he has focused his energy on Lifetime Analytics, developing an an end-to-end solution for marketing, product, sales and customer experience teams with telecom operators to address churn, upselling and cross-selling improvement opportunities. Its goal is to support the design of focused marketing, commercial and care action plans for selected customer groups that are at risk for churn, or that present an up-selling or cross-selling potential.

Churn is a key metric for telecommunications services providers – what proportion of the customer base disconnect each month. It is a way to measure customer satisfaction and happy customers translate into significant savings in costs of acquisition. As described in a recent article (“Beyond churn scoring“), Lifetime Analytics have “elaborated an innovative approach to understand churn factors and generate a continuously improving churn learning model in the telecommunications industry.”

The commonly used approach to analyze churn in the telecom industry relies on estimating the probability for each customer to churn, which is materialized in a scoring methodology that is then used as a guide for the elaboration of action plans. This scoring approach is typically based on automated learning from past churners, using a “classification” approach to distinguish churners and non-churners.

Lifetime Analytics discovered that a “cluster” approach was a better way to identify customers requiring commercial or care actions, enabling the design of targeted action plans and micro-campaigns, replacing more traditional scoring approaches that are often less actionable.

Lifetime Analytics is structured around 3 main features:

1. Lifetime Analytics automatically identifies clusters of customers that are at risk of churning or that present an up/cross-selling potential based on homogeneous factors. These clusters and resulting churn and up/cross-selling factors are consistently measured over time, and obviously evolve as customer situations and market conditions constantly change.
2. Lifetime Analytics enables teams to design and run targeted commercial/care actions on each cluster, and even subset of customers within each cluster for more granularity. The application also recommends actions with an integrated business case simulator allowing to fine-tune actions on any customer micro-segment.
3. Lifetime Analytics tracks and monitors the impact of these actions on the churn and ARPU dynamics both at the cluster and company levels. The application’s customer cohort monitoring provides a granular monitoring of implemented action impacts, allowing to identify continuous improvements and optimization opportunities.

Frederic tells me, “We believe one important point to convince telecom service providers to try our Lifetime Analytics application is that it can be easily implemented by telecom operators with a simple technical set-up, and without the need to launch an IT or integration project.” The application is based on a flexible open-data model, nourished on a regular basis with a set of pre-defined BSS and OSS data items, which can be enriched based on the needs and resources of each client.

I suspect there should be interest in this application from service providers of all sizes, and from telecom consultancy practices.

Let me know if I can help make an introduction.

The application period has opened for The 2023 Women of STAC Bursary Fund [application pdf].

In relation to last year’s bursary fund, I wrote “Creating A Better Reflection”, talking about how I learned the importance of diversity and inclusion early on in my career, nearly 40 years ago at Bell Labs in New Jersey. I wrote about programs we had where we would to go into inner city schools to stimulate interest in math and science from non-traditional communities. Our objective was to try to increase the number of young kids who might pursue those disciplines in high school and in university. Ultimately, the objective was to have a pool of candidate employees that were a better reflection of the markets we served. “We were playing the long game.”

In September, I wrote “Training The Next Generation Of Tower Technicians”, looking at efforts by the Structure, Tower and Antenna Council (STAC) to train the next generation of telecommunications tower technicians, supporting the growing need for wireless
connectivity.

The Women Of STAC is a subcommittee of the Council with a vision to encourage and support women in their pursuit of career advancement in the telecommunications and related industries in Canada. The committee works to identify areas where there are training, mentoring, and networking gaps and opportunities for the career advancement of women working in the telecommunications industry in Canada.

To that end, the Women of STAC offers a bursary, providing financial support to enable the pursuit of training, professional development, or academic programs for women in the telecommunications field. The fund is supported this year through financial contributions from Technostrobe, Varcon, WesTower, and the CWTA.

In addition to monetary support, the bursary recipients receive an invitation to participate at the annual STAC Conference (taking place March 28-29, 2023 in Niagara Falls), to gain valuable learning and networking opportunities with STAC members.

Applications must be received by February 27, 2023. For more information, send an email to info@stacouncil.ca.

I’d like to follow up on the passing reference I made recently to structural separation in my post about Australia’s broadband quagmire, the $50B government sinkhole known as NBN.

Structural separation is the regulatory theory that posits better consumer outcomes will be achieved if regulations require a separation between the builders of telecom network infrastructure and the retailers of telecom services. The theory is that the infrastructure company will have incentives to invest all of its energy in building better networks, and the various retail service providers will compete on an equal footing to deliver service excellence.

Two and a half years ago, at a meeting of Parliament’s Industry Committee (INDU), the British model was identified by Canadian Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner as an potential example for Canadian telecom policy. Tony Geheran, Chief Operations Officer at TELUS told the Committee, “I haven’t seen that work anywhere globally, to sustainable effect.”

At the time (May 19, 2020), I noted “Ofcom is showing that broadband speeds in the UK increased 18% between 2017 and 2018 to reach 54.2 Mbps. According to the CRTC, average speeds in Canada reached 126.0 Mbps by the end of 2018, an 89% increase over 2017.”

A year later (May 19, 2021), I provided an update: “According to Ofcom, “the average download speed of UK residential broadband services increased by 25% since 2019, from 64 Mbit/s to 80.2 Mbit/s.” According to the CRTC, at year-end 2019, 18 months ago, the average download speed in Canada was already 176.9 Mbps, more than double the current speed in the UK.”

Some recent articles show that the situation hasn’t improved for those in the UK. A recent article in the Financial Times says “almost a hundred smaller alternative networks — or “altnets” — have emerged with the goal of laying fibre as quickly as possible to attract customers frustrated by their existing service”. As it turns out, these “altnets”, such as Virgin Media O2 and the UK’s largest altnet, CityFibre, have argued against BT OpenReach lowering its wholesale prices, claiming the move would be uncompetitive.

The CRTC is reporting Canada’s average download speed was 220.4 Mbps by year end 2020, two and a half times what the UK regulator has observed.

Structural separation isn’t a solution. As Tony Geheren told INDU in May of 2020, “if you look at the UK, they are wholesale moaning about the quality of their infrastructure, their lack of fibre coverage. across what is a very small geography. I know. I originated from there. And quite frankly, the Canadian networks are far superior in coverage and quality and performance through COVID has demonstrated that.”

The Canadian model, creating a policy environment that encourages private sector investment in competitive infrastructures, means that most Canadians can choose from multiple suppliers of broadband access. It is a framework that has delivered better broadband for more Canadians than the structurally separated policies in the UK and (as discussed a few weeks ago) in Australia.

Canada’s future depends on connectivity.