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

Some miscellanea for your weekend reading list.

We are constantly teaching our kids that you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. We tell them to look at the sources.

As on-line news continues to overtake traditional media, one might hope that certain traditional media affiliated websites would apply journalistic standards to their reporting. It would seem to be a competitive differentiator.

Check out this excerpt from CBC Online’s coverage on Tuesday of the wholesale internet dispute:

Smaller ISPs were given access to the networks of phone companies in the first place because the incumbents held a natural infrastructure monopoly, which was initially built through taxpayer funds when they were government-owned. The rules were put in place to boost the number of competitors selling internet access to the public, and thus keep prices down and service levels up.

Which government-owned incumbents are they talking about? Most of Canada’s phone lines have been in the hands of the private sector for the 140 year history of the telephone.

What source did the CBC use for that erroneous factoid? Reading through the comments, that little error drove misplaced hostility.

Interestingly, most arguments against usage based billing say that it means an end to flat rate pricing.

It would effectively prevent competitive ISPs from offering flat-rated Internet services, or any other type of offering that didn’t follow Bell’s UBB model, since they would have no means of containing their costs, if their customers were to exceed Bell’s usage caps.

Now, many of these same people are saying that the major phone companies and cable companies should offer flat rate service, despite their own costs being tied to usage.

Just because your costs are variable doesn’t mean you can’t offer a flat rate price; ask any restaurant that offers an all-you-can-eat buffet. Of course, those restaurants might choose their locations carefully, to balance their client mix.

If you happen to read the story on CBC and then glance at the comments, you will notice that the knowledge of the masses doesn’t hold a lot of promise for our future. One of the most common errors is mixing up bits and bytes. I’ll simply observe that 60GB works out to 133 hours of continuous streaming of 1 Mbps. It is way more than most of us come close to using, and less than what some people want.

So, going back to all-you-can-eat restaurant – how would you strike a fair balance?

Finally, for your weekend reading pleasure, let me commend to you this article called “Do You Think Bandwidth Grows on Trees?” from Slate Magazine, to which I was pointed by a long-time associate, colleague and friend.

Enjoy the weekend.

Technorati Tags:
CBC, ISP

This blog is published using a free blogging tool, Blogger, provided by the good folks at Google.

The application is free; offered as part of the wonderous business model that characterizes many web applications. as such, there are limits to how demanding I can be as a user.

Unfortunately, Blogger has been experiencing growing pains recently. With Google acquiring various adjacent blogging tools, it has been trying to integrate the platforms for the various applications.

It seems that each time they touch one part of Blogger, another piece breaks. some of the analytics were out of service last week. A scheduled outage last night seems to have broken the ability to upload new posts today – which is why you may have thought that I took the day off. A lot of bloggers were in the same boat. The trouble seems to have cleared around 2:10pm today.

What was most frustrating was the inability to find anyone at Blogger to acknowledge that they were even aware of the problem!

Free applications sometimes are surprising in their ability to get the job done. Other times, it becomes clear that you get what you pay for.

Technorati Tags:
Blogger, Google