Announcements and news stories coming out of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona are indicating that a vibrant, competitive marketplace for consumers will continue. A tweet from Michael Hennessy pointed me to an interesting article in The Guardian, speaking about Europe’s fall from its leadership in the mobile world. Late in the day, he tweeted a pointer to an announcement that the major Canadian wireless carriers have agreed to provide the lead commercial trial for the GSMA’s OneAPI initiative.

In more news from Barcelona, some of the world’s largest mobile service providers, including all of the major US carriers, have created The Wholesale Applications Community, targetting Apple’s apps store. Twenty-four service providers, with access to 3 billion customers, have signed on, as well as manufacturers Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson. Wind Mobile appears to be the only Canadian carrier to have signed on at this time.

In a Barcelona media event hosted by CEO Steve Ballmer, Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7, delivering a more desktop-like experience for Windows applications. The browser is based on Internet Explorer, so mobile web-surfing might be more comparable to what users are after. Mobile Outlook has many of the functions of its desktop equivalent and it operates on locally cached data to run faster. All Windows Phone 7 devices are automatically Zune enabled and include XBox Live. It puts the PC strengths into the mobile device.

Microsoft has already established hardware partnerships with Qualcomm, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, HTC, HP, Dell and Garmin Asus. Special service provider relationships were announced with AT&T and Orange for distinctive applications development. No Canadian service providers were announced in the list of initial partners: AT&T, Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange, SFR, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telstra, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone. But, Windows Phone 7 enabled handsets aren’t scheduled to hit stores until the Christmas 2010 shopping season, so we can expect Canadian partners to sign on before then.

Harry Patz, Microsoft’s North America VP for the Communications Sector will be speaking at The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit on June 7.  Microsoft will be hosting an Innovation Showcase at the event. Early bird rates expire at the end of February. Have you registered yet?

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Did Bell Canada’s deferral account application force the Commission to look at restoring some of its regulatory powers under sections 24 and 27(2) of the Telecom Act?

In Telecom Notice of Consultation 2010-43, the CRTC said that it wanted comments on whether it was appropriate to restore some regulatory authority over mobile data:

The Commission notes that there is a link between issues regarding high-speed Internet service and mobile wireless data services, as well as the associated service providers. Accordingly, as part of the proceeding initiated by this notice, the Commission will review the appropriateness of the mobile wireless data services forbearance framework.

The CRTC asked for comments fairly broadly: “Should the Commission change the scope of forbearance with respect to mobile wireless data services, and if so, to what extent?”

Recall that Bell asked for authorization to use deferral account funding to provide broadband services that it has traditionally provisioned using DSL technologies. While all of the carriers enjoy forbearance from economic regulation, in Telecom Order 99-592, the CRTC retained S. 24 and S. 27(2). Section 24 regulatory authority was retained explicitly to continue to regulate confidentiality. When the CRTC granted forbearance to mobile services in Decision 96-14, it included release of Sections 24 and 27(2) for any non-voice mobile services.

In 1996, we had not yet seen the first Blackberry. Non-voice mobile services were hardly-used text messages and one-way pagers. Times have changed.

Now let’s go back to Bell’s deferral account application. If Bell uses its mobile data service capabilities to provide residential broadband, then consumers would be receiving a completely unregulated substitute (mobile data) as a substitute for a partly regulated service (DSL). That would raise questions about regulatory asymmetry; the principle that rules should be technology agnostic. If DSL is subject to Sections 24 and 27(2), why wouldn’t its proposed substitute also have these sections apply?

If the CRTC approves Bell’s deferral account plans for HSPA to deliver residential broadband, then it seems that the Commission would first need to reimpose certain regulatory authority over mobile service. The CRTC needs a consultation process before taking such a step. Which brings us to the current process.

But that raises another question. Has approval of Bell’s deferral account plan hit a delay? How can HSPA for deferral account projects be approved until after the 2010-43 process is complete (with a decision sometime in 2011)?

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For the past 3 years, Nokia Siemens Networks has been a sponsor of LECG‘s global research study into “useful connectivity”: metrics that encompass internet usage and skills as well as basic broadband infrastructure.

According to the authors, the LECG Connectivity Scorecard also recognizes that the primary driver of productivity and economic growth is the ability of businesses to use ICT effectively. As the authors write on the FAQ page, the LECG study gives business – and those measures related to business infrastructure and usage – the weight that economic statistics suggest it should be given.

Professor Len Waverman, Dean of the Haskayne School of Business at University of Calgary (and Fellow at London Business School) is the lead author of the report [pdf, 800MB]. Unlike many of the broadband indices, LECG looks beyond the plumbing. During the press briefing [available], Professor Waverman suggested that countries can readily improve their raw infrastructure scores through direct investment, such as economic stimulus.

Productive use of the infrastructure, “Useful Connectivity,” is a different and tougher area. How well can countries make use of their infrastructure; how to capture the level of interaction between the telecommunications infrastructure and the users. Raw scores of broadband lines, computers, advanced wireless network adoption and existence of corporate data networks are said to be important, but the authors point to the need to examine the human skills relevant to using the networks and technologies. Improving scores in these areas requires longer term adjustment of elements in national skills and education and economic policy. For example, the proportion of graduates employed and private sector researchers are among the data points considered.

The authors have made their data available to encourage discussion of the tough issues that go beyond a simplistic examination of which country wins top rankings. That honour belongs to Sweden this year, despite it failing to win a first place ranking in any single category. In aggregate, it scored a 7.95, which might indicate implying that it can improve by about 25% to be best in class in every category. Canada, the UK and Australia were clustered together at 7.02, 7.03 and 7.04 – Canada taking the number 9 spot this year in the weighted rankings.

The NSN/LECG Connectivity Scorecard is a serious piece of work.

There is much more analysis to be done and thanks to the transparency of the research, the NSN/LECG Scorecard provides an opportunity to contribute thoughtfully to the development of national digital economic policies. On Tuesday June 8, The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit will be looking at issues in respect of development of Canada’s national digital strategy.

Early bird rates expire in 2 weeks. Have you registered yet?

Notwithstanding nearly routine comparisons to China’s “Great Firewall”, increasingly we are seeing courts and governments in democracies around the world make determinations that certain content is illegal and orders are being issued to ISPs to block the transmission of the illegal material.

The latest I saw (thanks to a tweet by Barry Sookman) pointed to a court decision out of Italy that orders ISPs to implement blocking of The Pirate Bay catalog of torrents.

I am certain that we will hear about all sorts of collateral damage – innocent websites that get caught in the crossfire. why is this still happening?

We have university research that has been looking at ways to circumvent national firewalls – in effect, developing tools to assist in smuggling illegal bits across borders. For some reason, it seems to be less interesting for academic researchers to work on developing more effective, more efficient, more precise tools to enable enforcement of such judicial orders.

A court in Norway rejected blocking. Courts in two European countries reaching different conclusions on similar issues. I have written a number of times [see search results here] asking about how nations can or should assert sovereignty over the rules governing content on their national networks.

Is there a body of policy and technology research to be developed?

There were a couple of interesting stories last week that I found to be related.

First was a report that said that as many as a third of university students at some Canadian schools are unable to pass an English language proficiency exam. The story suggested the blame is spread between insufficient attention to grammar in the schools, coupled with students migrating their texting and social networking shortcuts into papers.

The second story was documenting a finding by the Pew Research Centre that blogging by teens and young adults has declined over the past 3 years. As any of us with that demographic in the household knows, Facebook has become the medium of expression.

I’m not convinced by the researcher’s explanation:

Teens in the U.S. have been told that putting your personal information out there publicly is a very bad idea — that it’s not safe, that people will come and harm you and your reputation. And I think because Twitter is so often used in a public way, teens, given all those cautions, don’t see the utility of it.

I think this is wishful thinking; there is still way too much personal information being shared on too many sites. [As an aside, I am going to ‘un-follow’ people who insist on tweeting the fact they are at Harveys or the bank or wherever; I just don’t care! Mark Evans also questions the viability of Four Square]

Is the decline in blogging, together with a migration to ‘short update’ tools like Twitter or Facebook, related to the decline in language proficiency?

Loosely associated with these articles was a presentation that I attended yesterday by Robert Watson of Sasktel. Among the takeaway messages I learned that Sasktel is expecting an enormous turnover in employees over the next few years due to retirements. The company has been active in area high schools, helping to increase the future labour pool by stimulating more kids to study relevant fields for future employment with the telco. A few years ago, I wrote about the need for us to inspire an innovation generation and I also wrote optimistically about some programs I have seen that are stimulating the pool of candidates.

Now, we need to make sure that we also find kids who can express themselves without resorting to emoticons for punctuation.