Having spent a few summers working in epidemiology, my son has an appreciation for statistical research studies related to public health care.

A controversy over the location of a wireless communications tower in South Africa caught his eye. To start with, the tower is apparently located in a cemetery, the Fourways Memorial Park, which might have been expected to minimize complaints, since it is hard to imagine any possible deleterious impact on the permanent residents.

Nonetheless, a tower erected by iBurst was said to cause a variety of health problems.

The company attended a meeting in mid-November and its CEO agreed to turn off the tower to assess whether the health problems subsided.

At the meeting on the 16th of November 2009 a number of residents and their staff confirmed that they were still experiencing symptoms such as rashes, headaches and the like and that these symptoms disappear when they leave the vicinity of the tower.

However, according to a news story last week, iBurst had already shut off the tower a month earlier. Whatever was causing the symptoms, it wasn’t the operation of the communications equipment.

There is a balance to be managed between the needs to have more towers to meet the needs of the public to communicate and the objections of neighbours to the sight lines and architectural characteristics of most towers. There is a body of good and bad science that often clouds the issue when public consultations are conducted as we wrote two years ago.

This case out of South Africa is a classic.

You would think that service providers would want to work at least as hard retaining existing customers as they do acquiring new customers off the street.

But many times, mobile wireless subscribers get frustrated when they find out that the upgrade price for a new phone is much higher than the offers available to new customers. It has often seemed as though service providers weren’t looking after their loyal customers as well as they took care of potential customers who have already proven that they are willing to switch.

I am sure many of you have seen offers for Blackberries or other smartphones available to new customers for free or low prices, but when you call to upgrade your old equipment you learn that the prices for existing customers are much higher.

No more for Rogers. A note I received describes the new policy:

Rogers customers will now be eligible for the same pricing as new customers on all devices at 24 months since initial activation or last upgrade.

Customers with a higher average monthly spend may be eligible for smartphones even sooner. After 12 months, there is some form of discount available.

Customers who want to determine their device eligibility can visit a retail location, go to MyAccount on Rogers.com or call the contact centre.

A paper out of the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) examines answers to “Does Broadband Boost Local Economic Development?”

Many might flame PPIC for daring to ask such a question, but with billions of dollars in public funds being spent by governments around the world, it seems appropriate for some science to be applied to study the benefits.

The federal government and the state of California, as well as other states throughout the nation, have made universal access to broadband service a public policy goal, assuming that multiple economic and social benefits will accrue from increasing broadband access.

The study found a positive relationship between broadband expansion and employment growth, but the benefits for local residents are ambiguous.

The positive relationship between broadband expansion and economic growth is stronger in industries that rely more on information technology and in areas with lower population densities. Although there is evidence leaning in the direction of a causal relationship, the study could not determine that broadband caused this economic growth.

In respect of personal benefits, average wage and the employment rate were seen to be unaffected by broadband expansion. The economic benefits to households are thus more ambiguous than they would be if employment growth also led to an increase in wages or the employment rate.

The 30 page report is very readable and it should contribute to the discussion beyond the borders of California.

The US Department of Justice has filed a submission with the FCC calling for improved utilization and freeing up wireless spectrum as the priority for promoting broadband competition:

Reallocating spectrum that is being underutilized would encourage the deployment of wireless services and could help to make such services more competitive with wireline offerings.

First, an increase in the amount of spectrum that firms could devote to broadband would lower the cost of providing wireless broadband services and encourage entry. Second, more spectrum would allow providers to increase the capacity and reliability of their offerings, thereby bringing them closer to cable modem and fiber-based broadband. Third, the increased capacity in the systems would help support new applications.

The DOJ submission is written from a perspective similar to Canada’s Competition Bureau: improving customer benefits through increased choice of suppliers. The filing discusses the nature of competition in the broadband marketplace and highlights the role of making additional spectrum available for broadband service delivery.

In a session looking at “Building Digital Canada,” The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit will examine issues associated with advancing Canada’s national digital strategy.

DOJ Broadband Submission to FCC http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=25103464&access_key=key-21ig5q5ijvy4c4ttatip&page=1&version=1&viewMode=list

Alec Saunders observed on his blog that Canadians should avoid Google’s new Nexus One device, for now. While Google has chosen not to even offer the phone for direct sale in Canada, sites like Mobile Syrup offer step-by-step instructions on how Canadians can get the device.

But as Alec points out, Google did more than restrict its distribution channels. For some reason, Google chose to not enable 3G on the most popular radio frequencies used in North America – 850 and 1900 MHz.

In other words, Google has effectively optimized the device for T-Mobile in the US and perhaps the nascent AWS spectrum winners in Canada. In a well publicized blog posting last December, Google’s SVP of Product Management, Jonathan Rosenberg wrote about “The meaning of open.”

At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. …

So if you are trying to grow an entire industry as broadly as possible, open systems trump closed. And that is exactly what we are trying to do with the Internet. Our commitment to open systems is not altruistic.

By choosing not to enable 3G on the most widely used bands, it sure looks like Google has artificially created an effectively exclusive network distribution for T-Mobile, while maintaining the appearance of support for open, and unlocked technologies.

Perhaps Google is simply trying to work out bugs in its supply chain, fulfillment and customer support networks by limiting the device’s operational functionality to fewer networks. There are no shortage of complaints about customer service for the Nexus One (The search terms “Nexus One complaints” produces 1.1M hits on Google).

However, when customers are paying more than $500 for a supposedly unlocked and open device, don’t they expect to be able to use it on other networks?