Rogers has announced a significant upgrade to the speeds on its mobile wireless network with the evolution to HSPA+ technology. Beginning in the greater Toronto area, Rogers mobile customers will have access to download speeds of up to 21 Mbps, beating many wired internet access services.

Rogers is the first wireless provider in North America and only the sixth carrier in the world to launch HSPA+ at peak speeds of 21 Mbps, putting Canada on top of the world in technology and innovation and once again, bringing leading-edge technologies to Canadian consumers first.

Rogers will offer next generation Rocket sticks that can take advantage of the new speeds.

In the past week, Rogers Wireless has made a number of announcements that should continue to maintain its leadership – wholesale services to Videotron, Manitoba joint venture and with this announcement, an ability to roll out a serious mobile-based broadband service across the country that can compete with wireline services.

Less than 2 years ago, Rogers became the first carrier in North America to launch 7.2 Mbps service, advancing on its April, 2007 launch of Vision services, also a North American first.

There is more to competition than just pricing. With these investments in innovation, Rogers is signalling that its approach will be to continue offering world beating services to Canadians.

Relevant to yesterday’s posting, Rogers’ advanced 21 Mbps HSPA+ network is powered by Canadian innovation, developed by Ericsson in Montreal.

The Canadian nationalists are coming out of hiding, expressing concern about the loss of our national icon, Nortel, to those evil foreigners from Ericsson. Our governments had earlier turned their backs on Nortel as we invested in other Canadian firms like, ummmm, General Motors.

Now that the first Nortel asset auction has been completed, we are hearing that the Ontario government wants Ottawa to intervene to ensure that Canada’s national interest isn’t harmed.

These Ericsson folks aren’t the typical raiders. They aren’t Americans – they’re too busy bailing out … well, just about everything.

These are Swedes, Europeans no less.

People who play hockey and curling almost as well as we do. They eat herring three times a day. Herring isn’t really fish; it is what fish eats. Are we really going to let a treasure like Nortel fall into the hands of people who eat bait?

Before we allow Ontario’s Finance Minister to bash these folks too much, we should remember that Ericsson Canada is already one of the largest R&D; organizations in Canada, having invested more than $2B in Canada over the last 10 years. Of course, Ontario may consider that to be foreign investment, since Ericsson has such a large Montreal-based research centre. The Montreal labs have been around for 20 years, and represent one of the most important locations for Ericsson’s wireless network development, with more than 1500 people, Montreal is its largest R&D; centre outside Sweden.

Ericsson’s Montreal presence is important enough for Canada that it is featured on a government website that speaks about why companies should invest in Montreal as the:

Site of an ICT cluster built on the success of leading companies including Bell Canada, Electronic Arts, Ericsson Canada, CGI Group, IBM and Ubisoft International

Ericsson has been in Canada for more than 50 years and it has established deep relationships in this country. Ericsson executives participate in leadership roles in Canada’s R&D; and technology community, including our university engineering programs and CANARIE. Ericsson Canada’s CTO works with me on an advisory board for a University of Toronto’s Engineering graduate program.

Ericsson has another R&D; centre in Vancouver with more than 200 people; its Toronto headquarters employs 150 people.

I’ll be watching to see how we stick-handle our way around welcoming Ericsson investment in jobs in Montreal but discourage them keeping jobs in Ottawa. Our government’s response will have implications for the willingness of foreign companies to continue investing in Canadian jobs.

You could say I’ll be waiting with baited breath.

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Update [July 28, 9:30 am]
Mark Evans writes about The Politics of Nortel’s Future this morning.

Sometimes I wonder if people really understand how peer-to-peer file sharing works. I listened to the CRTC discussions and I am following some of the “post-game analysis”.

Some of the rhetoric is just plain silly. Frankly, I think that there are a lot of outspoken people who might want to stop to listen and think before speaking out.

Like the call for a class action lawsuit that I read about on Tech Media Reports:

Yet Rogers disclosed that the upload speeds are actually identical for P2P traffic as they are both throttled equally. I find that extremely deceptive and can’t help but wonder whether they open themselves up to a class action lawsuit by Extreme subscribers who don’t get the service they think they do.

I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that before someone sues someone else, you need to have someone who experienced some harm.

Let’s go back to look at the first principles for what is meant by P2P file transfer in order to understand why there is no harm to the uploader.

Most consumers subscribe to an asymmetric internet connection. That means that it works faster in one direction than the other. For most of us, we receive information (download) faster than we can provide it (upload).

So, lets say that I want to download a file that you have. If I get it from you directly, the fastest I could possibly receive it would be based on your upload connection speed, regardless of my faster download speed. I might get frustrated because I subscribe to a fast download capability and I might even blame my ISP, even though the real problem is that the source of the traffic is what is slowing down the transfer.

So, either you could upgrade to a very expensive symmetric internet service, or I might find a creative way to get the file faster. Many of the types of files that I want to get from you (music, movies, courseware, etc.) are sitting on other computers, not just yours. So some bright minds thought that I could get the file twice as fast faster if I got a few pieces from you, and a few pieces from another person at the same time. After all, you may only be uploading at say, 640 kbps and my download capacity is 8 times that. So, if two is better than one, why not try to get 8 streams working at once, or even more.

The P2P file transfer software tries to find people from around the world who have the file that I want and gets them all to provide pieces so that we all max out the upload and download capacity of our pipes. And, as soon as I get the first piece of the file, my computer gets identified as a potential source for other people.

You get the picture.

The software, by design, is supposed to keep the pipes full.

When I use the peer-to-peer file sharing application, my purpose is to have access to files found on other people’s computers. While I may altruistically want to contribute the files on my computer to the global pool of access points, I am trying to imagine a situation where I have a real concern about whether other people can get my files at full speed versus any kind of upload constraints that are imposed by my ISP.

After all, by design, the software will find other computers that are also sources for the file, so the person downloading from me isn’t harmed either.

I understand frustration by users in having an ISP manage download speeds. That could add to the time it takes to receive the whole file. But even those more aggressive management techniques don’t impact real-time applications like streaming video or other bulk file transfer protocols such as direct point-to-point downloads, such as those used by most companies.

P2P file transfer is not how you send an email or send your photos or update your blog or file your term paper, or do real time streaming. What is wrong with managing P2P upload speeds to ensure the proper operation of the rest of the applications – for you and everyone else served by your ISP?

Sometimes, I wonder about who is reading this blog.

There are various webtools that count hits on the blog website, subscribers to my RSS feed, Twitter followers, or whatever. I have noticed that while there are a lot of you reading, there are not a lot of comments. Perhaps I have attracted a shy demographic readership. Or, so many of you are in positions of influence in corporations or government and, while you may want to shout criticisms or platitudes, your pension-influenced discipline holds you back.

In the early days of my blog, I was told that this medium enables a public conversation. Often, it seems more like a radio talk show – anyone can be a host and no one screens the callers.

A recent tweet from one of the people I follow asks:

Can reasonable debate occur online if people kick back from anonymous posts. its not like we live in Iran

He expounded further on his blog

So is this is what the fight for net neutrality is all about? The right to opine in 140 characters or less and to boil down complex debate into nuggets like “you suck”. Great. With all the opportunity for enlightenment that the Internet offers we get”Pounder” and his ilk instead.

A few years ago, I wrote about “4 degrees of impersonal communications“. The four degrees were: face-to-face; telephone; email; and web-based.

The Progress & Freedom Foundation has released a submission by its president, Kenneth Ferree, to the FCC [pdf, 345KB] that makes for an entertaining read. C’mon, how many regulatory submissions are able to squeeze in a citation for Nietzsche by the top of the second page?

I found that many of the arguments are as applicable to Canada as the US market for which it was targetted. As the press release states:

Ferree takes issue with claims that a duopoly in landline broadband markets would necessarily be, by nature, market failure. Instead, because of the high fixed costs associated with networked industries, price competition between too many providers could impair investment.

How many competitors should there be? We hear similar complaints in Canada.

As Ferree’s paper observes, a failed market might observe excessive returns by market participants. But, as the paper observes for the US (and equally applicable in Canada), the supposed duopolists aren’t making excessive profits. Margins for network providers are consistent with other companies. Other so-called duopolies exist in other sectors without the same calls for government intervention, such as Coke and Pepsi; or, Lowes and Home Depot.

By far, my favourite line from the submission deals with the issue of broadband adoption among people that have access to competitive supply of services:

As hard as it is for some in Washington to believe, there may be a large swath of middle-America that would rather sit on the front porch, sip lemonade, and chat with their neighbors than update their profiles on Facebook.

I have written about this phenomenon in Canada [here and here]. What we define as affordable, universal access isn’t enough to get people to subscribe.

The submission is a great contribution to the debate about the role of government in intervening in the marketplace for broadband services. Lines like “When confronted with actual facts, the advocates of heavy-handed regulation are forced to retreat to rhetoric” serve as a challenge to move beyond sound-bites into genuine analysis.