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?

---

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.

While CIPPIC is deservedly collecting praise for its successful challenge of Facebook’s privacy practices, it recently lost a challenge related to deep packet inspection (DPI).

CIPPIC had argued that: (1) Bell uses DPI to collect and use personal information without customers’ consent; (2) Bell collects more personal information than is necessary to ensure network integrity and service quality; and, (3) Bell does not adequately inform its customers of its practices.

In a letter to CIPPIC and Bell, the Privacy Commission concluded that only the third complaint was “well-founded”:

Accordingly, the complaint is not well-founded with regard to the two matters of consent and limiting collection, but well-founded with regard to the matters of openness.

In respect of increasing transparency, the changes sought appear relatively minor:

• Agreeing with Bell’s idea to add a FAQ on the Bell Privacy web pages
• Adding a statement to Bell’s existing FAQ on network management to state that the customer’s IP address is collected
• Adding a heading (along the lines of “Customer Service Information”) to Bell’s internet service agreements

The Privacy Commission made some important statements in its 18 page Report of Findings.

For example, the Privacy Commission found:

• Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications are large users of bandwidth. Applications that are often used for music and movie file sharing between computers can consume a great deal of capacity and “slow down” other internet traffic;
• The investigation confirmed that the use of P2P does increase network traffic and that the widespread phenomenon of congestion is largely caused by user downloads or file sharing using P2P;
• DPI and other traffic management tools are among several means by which ISPs can optimize traffic flow.

To what extent will these findings be consistent with the CRTC’s review of network management practices? Is this a foreshadowing?

---

Update [August 28, 1:10 pm]
Here is a link to the OPC finding [ pdf, 2.19MB]

The US is moving to ban robocalls, those really annoying pre-recorded calls that most of us have received from credit agencies or cruise lines. But the new rules aren’t coming from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC – the US counterpart to the CRTC). Instead, it will be changes to the Telemarketing Sales Rule from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

According to AP:

Before the ban, consumers had to specifically join a do-not-call list to avoid prerecorded telemarketing calls. But after Sept. 1, consumers shouldn’t get most of these calls anymore.

Will that US hardware be pointed northward to continue to harass Canadians?

An article in Sunday’s Washington Post has some good commentary on why fibre doesn’t necessarily belong in every diet.

I remember a basic systems engineering principle that says most people define their requirements in terms of a familiar solution, rather than looking at the real requirements.

As a result, it is common for governments to say that they need fibre – defining fibre as a requirement, rather than a solution. In doing so, they restrict the degrees of freedom for solutions that could be innovative and more cost effective.

Look at this quote from Mitsuko Herrera, cable and broadband administrator in one of the counties seeking $130M from the US stimulus pork barrel and tell me what is wrong:

We’re looking at rural businesses. We have family farms — only half of them have Web sites. Once you get fiber optics, you can build a Web site . . . to match people who grow locally with people who want to eat local food.

Does this broadband administrator really expect each farm to become its own website host?

Australia – spending more than $40B of taxpayers money on its national broadband program – has recognized that 10% of the population will not be connected with wireline solutions.

In the Post article, a representative of Hughes Network Systems points out that fiber-optic connections are not particularly cost-effective, especially in sparsely populated rural areas.

I have frequently written about the role of fixed wireless and satellite broadband in allowing Canada to already boast 100% availability of broadband. Wireline solutions provide coverage to around 94% of the Canadian population, already ahead of Australia’s ultimate objective.

Broadband availability is only one side of the question.

Broadband adoption is an issue that needs to be a focus. It is a concern for urban and rural Canada. We need to develop a greater understanding of what are the factors that keep people from getting connected.