Not sure what the past two months have been like for weather in your part of the world, but in central Ontario, the weather has been conducive to improved office productivity. There were too few opportunities to play hooky.

On July 1, I suggested that I was going to switch to summer schedule for this blog and then I wrote two weeks later that the network management proceeding kept things active. Add to that the release of a series of disappointingly flawed OECD reports, DNCL prosecutions, broadband policy, and more. It has been a busy couple of months.

No golf clubs were swung, no pike were harmed in the making of this summer.

Well, it is the last long weekend of the summer, the sky is clear and the forecast is for more of the same. I’m going to pause for a couple days.

See you next week.

Three years ago, I wrote about the sale of the Holmdel Bell Labs facility that was my workplace in the mid-1980s. That was mourning the loss of the building.

The Business Week article talks about the loss of the basic research capabilities with ever shrinking budgets. As recently as 2001, Bell Labs had 30,000 employees; today there are 1000.

The effects of the massive scaling back of American science and engineering research in the 1990s and 2000s may just be beginning. Unless reversed, it is likely to have its greatest impact a decade from now, when the missing discoveries of a generation earlier would have been expected to come to commercial fruition. It’s time to identify—and fix—the root of the problem.

The article suggests an aggressive tax credit system to finance $20B in new fundamental research, to enable a new innovation ecosystem to begin to build critical mass.

From the government’s perspective, the money put toward innovation today is the highest-return investment it can make.

According to the article, only 20% of American jobs pay better than $60,000. The remaining 80% pay an average of $33,000 raising concerns about the foundations of a strong middle class.

I commend the article to you and thank Alec for the pointer.

So much industrial R&D is focused on development rather than research. What steps will Canada take to ensure its a place in a next generation economy?

Alec Saunders is in the middle of a trip and he has been tweeting about challenges he has had with his communications on the road.

First he wrote:

Just ran the xtreme labs Speedtest on my iPhone 3G. Got 280K down, and 218K up on AT&T; here in LA. How do you Americans stand this?

and then:

On Rogers Rocket Stick (5 to 7M M down, 1.5 to to 2 up) AT&T; delivers 1M down and 200K up. BRUTAL!

I wrote a couple weeks ago about a recent Merrill Lynch report which said Canada is beating the US with our mobile broadband networks. Alec is providing some empirical evidence.

You will recall that in April, Australia announced plans to spend A$43B (around $40B in Canadian funds) on broadband. That money, to be spent over the next 8 years, is to get a network capable of delivering 100Mbps service to 90% of the population, and the rest of the country will get served by next generation wireless and satellite service.

Well, guess what Canada? We’ve won.

According the CRTC’s 2009 Communications Monitoring Report, 94% of Canadian households can already get a terrestrial broadband service. 80% of us can be reached by cable modem service; 84% can get DSL. Most of Canada’s cable companies have now launched DOCSIS 3.0 based service, with data rates up to 100 Mbps available.

The rest of us are already within reach of wireless and satellite.

The private sector is delivering more service, to more Canadians, with competitive choice of suppliers, without government intervention and without taxpayer cash and without us having to wait 8 years.

With the announcement of the next steps for Canada’s $225M broadband stimulus package due any day now, a question remains how should the money should be spent to stimulate higher rates of adoption?

Improving broadband adoption requires a focus on more than just building more terrestrial availability. Customers have to see the value of subscribing. I have written before about leading a horse to water… [here and here].

Everyone who wants broadband internet in Canada can have it – but at what price. How can we help make rural broadband more affordable and accessible? How do we convince more users to take a drink?

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Update [September 1, 11:10 am]
Industry Canada has now released its Call for Applications.

Having a tweet of mine cited by a CBC story confirmed the importance of attention to precision on Twitter. With Twitter, you only get 140 characters to express a thought, so you need to be succinct. [see Mark Evans’ post on this yesterday]

When I broke the story on Friday about the Office of the Privacy Commissioner releasing its findings about Bell’s use of deep packet inspection, I wrote 4 tweets about various aspects of the report, including one that said:

Office of Privacy Commission (OPC) approves Bell’s use of DPI: http://tinyurl.com/kr9o7k

CBC’s story credits me with breaking the story, listing my tweet right above a couple paragraphs that go on to say:

A spokesperson for the commissioner, however, said the office was certainly not approving DPI.

“It would not be accurate to suggest, in reading the finding, that we are endorsing DPI,” she said.

The juxtaposing might lead some to think that OPC was contradicting me. Of course, I didn’t tweet that the OPC approves DPI. I said that the OPC approved Bell’s use of DPI, and then provided the link to the full story on my blog.

And, as the CBC wrote:

Bell has stated that the DPI platform it uses has this capability, but that it is currently not using it for this purpose. It has also assured this office that any added purpose for which it currently uses PI would respect the company’s privacy obligations… its own privacy policies an applicable customer agreements.

The process for the privacy commission’s review was started by a CIPPIC letter in May 2008 that, at the time, CBC quoted as stating:

Practices [such as] those involving the collection and use of personal information are not necessary to ensure network integrity and quality of service.

Moreover, subscribers whose traffic is being inspected have not consented to the inspection and use of their data for this purpose.

The OPC disagreed and said these complaints were not well founded.

Precision is important.