As I read James Bagnall’s story in the Ottawa Citizen about Nortel last Wednesday and colour commentary by Mark Evans, I thought that there will be case study material for Canada’s business schools for decades to come as armchair CEOs replay and analyze missteps made by management and the board.

Management is rarely blessed with the benefit of hindsight. On the other hand, good managers can surround themselves with more diverse viewpoints in order to improve the breadth of information that contributes to more effective decision-making.

There was a quote in the story that reminded me of a personal experience 25 years ago.

Nortel achieved this distinction by spending more than $2 billion (all figures U.S.) annually on R&D;, and hiring up to 30 per cent of Canada’s masters grads in electrical engineering.

I didn’t have a graduate degree in engineering – my Masters is in Mathematical Statistics.

AT&T Bell Laboratories was recruiting people with diverse graduate degrees – some of them engineers, but many of them from completely non-technical disciplines. I saw geography and music majors when I worked there. All of them were very bright; all of them had a technical aptitude.

The recruiting guidelines suggested that we ask candidates what kind of hobbies the potential employee had. Did you like to play with Lego or Tinkertoys as a kid? Did you ever take apart the family car radio? Depending how they answered those questions, we figured we could teach them how the phone business worked.

Perhaps initially driven by Affirmative Action programs that demanded that AT&T spread its recruiting beyond white males, it was a systemic difference between Bell Labs and BNR.

Sandvine filed reply comments [ pdf, 364 KB] in the CRTC’s Network Management proceeding that directly addresses the populist myths about deep packet inspection that were raised by the Privacy Commissioner and the expert for CAIP in their initial comments.

Single Lens Reflex (SLR) technology underlies cameras that take photos at family birthday parties. The same technology has been applied for surveillance of individuals and public spaces. One use of the technology raises privacy issues, the other does not. Nobody questions the value or validity of the camera technology. So why question DPI technology? Privacy concerns properly attach to applications or uses of technologies, not to the technologies themselves.

Sandvine CEO Dave Caputo will be speaking on the Net Neutrality panel at The 2009 Canadian Telecom Summit. Have you registered yet?

What is the best strategy to encourage investment in facilities based telecommunications competition?

That question is at the core of both sets of telecom carrier appeals to cabinet filed in mid-March.

In the Essential Services Decision, the Commission wrote:

117. The Commission notes that fibre-based access and transport services include CDN DS-3, OC-3, OC-12, and Ethernet services.

118. The Commission notes that the record indicates a high incidence of competitor self-supply or alternative supply of fibre-based access and transport facilities. The Commission considers that the reported level of alternative supply demonstrates the existence of competition in the upstream market for such facilities.

In evidence [pdf, 425KB] filed with cabinet, there is a question raised about whether the CRTC’s statistics may have been somewhat self-fulfilling; the evidence shows that a trivial percentage of Toronto’s business addresses have access to competitor fibre facilities.

But is that a fair characterization of the issue? Let’s face it, corner convenience stores and dry cleaners aren’t priority fibre candidates for either the ILEC or for competitive carriers.

Isn’t the real question whether competitors are able to reach the same types of “high data rate” customers as the ILEC?

That was the question the CRTC looked at in its statistics gathering and the facts established evidence of “a high incidence of competitor self-supply or alternative supply of fibre-based access and transport facilities.”

The Commission also looked at the issue of competition for fibre-based services on an exchange-by-exchange basis in the context of digital network access forbearance for high speed services. A substantial number of exchanges are forborne on the basis of this detailed analysis.

Two different ways of looking at the numbers; both indicate competitive supply for fibre-based services.

We’ll be looking at these policy issues and so much more at The 2009 Canadian Telecom Summit, June 15-17 in Toronto. Are you registered yet?

Is training a discretionary expense to be cut during these challenging times? What message are you sending to your staff and your customers with that approach.

An article on itBusiness.ca’s website speaks about winning companies investing in more training during slow economic periods, not less.

Here is how Harry Rosen approaches conferences and training:

Today, when the situation is difficult I’m going to intensify training for the staff…

I believe in spending money sending staff to trade shows, visiting vendors, talking to them. It’s very expensive, but it makes career people out of them, makes them fully informed about their customers.

The only conference you need to attend is The 2009 Canadian Telecom Summit, June 15-17. Meet with your suppliers, customers, colleagues, policy makers, regulators and potential future partners.

Register now: www.telecomsummit.com or download the complete conference brochure here.

Technorati Tags:
training, Canadian Telecom Summit

I was pointed to an interesting story in the New York Times about the problems with advertising supported internet applications.

At the root of the story is a little factoid: There may be 1.6 billion people in the world with Internet access, but fewer than half of them have incomes high enough to interest major advertisers.

Call it the International Paradox.

Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

It is therefore a challenge for applications companies of sweating the details of distribution. In designing technology solutions, it is relatively easy to handle the “standard” cases; problems arise when you need to deal with everything off the beaten path.

A superficial view believes the internet makes the world flat – that all content can be accessed as easily everywhere thanks to a globally connected network.

Right.

It takes effort to make that kind of magic work. Effort means costs. Costs need to be recovered somewhere.

How do you deal with the high cost of delivering services when the opportunity for payback is slim? ISPs may not be the only ones who need to manage their networks?