The Associated Press is reporting that two friends in Pennsylvania exchanged 217,000 SMS messages, resulting in an itemized bill for $26,000 for one, despite both of them subscribing to unlimited texting plans.

T-Mobile waived the charges while it is investigating.

You have to wonder what else the two, 29 and 30 years old, had time to do in March. Perhaps they are unemployed as a result of the economy: alternatively, they are about to be unemployed when their bosses realize that they weren’t focussed on work for the last month!

Before you try to break their new record, check to see if your service provider’s terms of service has any asterisks beside the word “unlimited”.

Technorati Tags:
SMS, T-Mobile

One of the new sessions at this year’s Canadian Telecom Summit will be looking at how to make better use of information that is buried within service providers’ systems. We call the session “Mining for data gold” and it is a panel being moderated by my long time friend and colleague Mike Shulist.

The panel has an cast of global leaders in telecom information systems: Michael Couture (Head of Global Marketing, Amdocs), Victor Garcia (CTO, HP Canada), Zarar Rana (CEO, ConceptWave Software), Duby Yoely (VP, TTI Telecom), Bohdan Zabawskyj(CTO, Redknee) and Kelly Hlavinka (Partner, Colloquy). You will hear from these people how service providers are able to increase their revenues from existing clients, and better target offers to attract new customers.

The full conference brochure can be downloaded here [ pdf, 284 KB].

Global communications industry leaders are coming to Toronto from June 15-17 to join Canada’s most important annual gathering. Have you registered yet?

Technorati Tags:
Canadian Telecom Summit

Not everyone down under is thrilled with the plans by the Australian Government to build its own fibre to the premises (“FTTP”) network for AU$43B. CBC described the network plan in a story last week.

Here are links to 4 articles that provide colour on the government plan.

The first is a report from news.com.au on preliminary survey results, showing that a bare majority of Australians like the idea.

From The Australian: “The broadband betrayal“:

The Japanese government began heavily subsidising FTTP more than 15years ago; FTTP coverage reached almost 100 per cent coverage 10 years ago. But today’s FTTP penetration (subscriptions per 100 inhabitants) is 11.0. Less than half of all broadband subscriptions are FTTP.
…
FTTP is technically superior (in speed). [Communications Minister] Conroy describes it as the Rolls-Royce. But even if we think Rolls-Royces are superior, almost no one buys them; we prefer to trade-off “superiority” for lower cost.

On the lack of economic sense, you might read another Australian commentary: “Rudd flouts rules with market play“.

Will consumers be prepared to pay $150 or $200 a month for 100megabits per second of broadband? Because it will probably need to cost this much to attract private investment.

From Australia’s Business Day, there is “Where’s the vision in Rudd’s broadband plan“:

The Government’s telecommunications policy envisages developing a government-controlled monopoly that will use the best technology cost effectively. This overlooks the long experience of poor management of government businesses…

Will this network really get built?

Last October, I wrote that the CRTC had issued a public notice to take a fresh look at a few of the telemarketing rules.

The CRTC has now issued its ruling. On the 3 items under review, the CRTC decided:

1. Political parties are exempt from the Do Not Call List (DNCL) rules, but up until today, independent candidates were subject to those rules. Should the exemption be expanded? Yes
2. Formerly, DNCL registrations expire after 3 years. Now extended to 5 years
3. The CRTC has rules on acceptable times of day for auto-dialers to call people. Certain provinces have different hours. Where provincial rules exist, they prevail

The five year registration period automatically applies to the more than 6.7 million telephone numbers already registered in the DNCL, as well as to any future registrations.

When we will see the first prosecution under the rules?

Industry Canada has intervened in the tower sharing negotiations, issuing some clarifications on the rules of engagement between the new mobile wireless carriers and incumbents.

From the discussion on the Industry Canada website, it appears that some of the incumbents were not negotiating with the generosity of spirit that was in keeping with the intent of the department. As an example, at least one of the carriers had been asking new entrants to sign an onerous non-disclosure agreement in advance of getting any information – and asked for the discussions to be exclusive as a condition of the NDA, even in advance of providing any information.

If some of the parties were concerned that Industry Canada lacked reasonable enforcement tools, the new direction makes it clear that the department is armed with a refined set of proportionate responses to bad behaviour:

Where a licensee is found to be in non-compliance with the conditions of licence for antenna tower and site sharing, the Department may consider the suspension or revocation, in whole or in part, of the Licensee’s radio and/or spectrum licences associated with the site where the breach of licence occurred.

Some may have thought that there is no way that Industry Canada would revoke an entire national license over bad faith negotiations. But targeting on a site by site basis has a certain biblical measure of proportionality.

The leaders of Dave Wireless, Globalive and Public Mobile will all be appearing on June 17 at The 2009 Canadian Telecom Summit in Toronto. Have you registered yet?

Technorati Tags:
AWS, Canadian Telecom Summit, Industry Canada