Listening to today’s hearings at the CRTC’s new media proceeding, I heard a number of complaints that Canadian broadcasters weren’t being helpful enough in developing new media for distribution on the internet.

The sense I got was that today’s witnesses felt that not enough broadcasters were interested in acquiring internet distribution rights for Canadian programs or the broadcasters weren’t interested in working with the creators to develop interactive programming.

I was left wondering why distribution would be limited to websites controlled by the broadcasters. Why aren’t creators developing their own platforms to attract viewers to lay claim to advertising revenues or sell content through global content aggregators?

The internet creates an opportunity to bypass the traditional broadcasting system. A limited number of channels with a finite number of hours in a day imposed a cap on the ability for creators to reach their audience.

No such limits exist in an internet world. As the Chair pointed out in one of his questions before lunch, there is unlimited shelf space in an internet world. No bottlenecks; no gatekeepers.

In this morning’s opening remarks, the Chairman asked:

Are measures needed to support the promotion and visibility of Canadian broadcasting content in New Media?

Is it really just about money?

One of the presenters this morning said that their polling indicates that Canadian’s support ISPs and WSPs paying into a fund to support Canadian content. Would support be as high if Canadians were asked if they want their own internet and wireless bills to increase by 3%?

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new media, CRTC

It is tough enough for telephone companies to find ways to grow their revenues; growing them profitably is even more difficult.

The public sector and health technology are two areas that will see increased spending in telecom related areas. Can competing carriers take on these opportunities in a manner that doesn’t hurt their margins?

I noticed two important wins announced by MTS Allstream last week, a unified communications project for the City of New Westminster and an electronic records project for Kamloops.

Despite sitting in the heart of TELUS’ home turf, both cities chose solutions from MTS Allstream. As municipal projects, connectivity is manageable and both cities are part of MTS Allstream’s national fibre backbone.

Some of the challenges with mega-projects being awarded on a federal or provincial level is keeping control of the cost of access and being able to transition the customer network compliant with tight RFP requirements. In some cases, carriers have won contracts with questionable returns to the bottom line.

Eric Fletcher, SVP Marketing at MTS Allstream will be speaking at a session looking at unified communications at The 2009 Canadian Telecom Summit, taking place in June in Toronto. Early bird registration rates expire at the end of February. Have you registered yet?

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MTS Allstream, Canadian Telecom Summit

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the announcement of a suite of internet measurement tools released with Google’s support. I had observed that the test sites were overwhelmed with traffic.

A reader wrote me to say that he finally connected with Google’s Measurement Lab website and he has some suggestions for future developments.

M-Lab is promoted as the result of a small group of academics having been approached by Google to research ways to provide users with tools to test their broadband connections. It offers these tools:

• Network Diagnostic Tool: Test your connection speed and receive sophisticated diagnosis of problems limiting speed.
• Glasnost: Test whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled.
• Network Path and Application Diagnosis: Diagnose common problems that impact last-mile broadband networks.
• DiffProbe (coming soon): Determine whether an ISP is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic.
• NANO (coming soon): Determine whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations.

My disciple suggests, with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, that researchers may want to work on the following:

1. wwwglasnostic – think www + glasnost + diagnostic – It would be a test to determine whether a content provider on the internet has done a special deal with any government to block politically “sensitive” information. Don’t the Chinese people have a right to know the degree and form of censorship that is being implemented re: certain subjects?
2. Ad$Probe – It would measure the amount of web advertising revenue that is being earned (and by whom) as a result of a user’s online wandering. Don’t internet users have a right to know how much money is being made as a result of their viewing or using anything online?

Any suggestions for other tools? Students – get working on your projects!

I was scanning the charges on one of my mobile phones phones and found the following:

Type of usage	Usage Description	You used	Unit of measure	Total cost ($)
Text Msg	US Text Messages – sent	1	Msgs	0.25
Text Msg	US txt msgs – sent	1	Msgs	0.60

It was not intuitively clear to me why one message was a quarter and another was 60 cents. And, as it turns out, it took an agent at the call centre almost 10 minutes to tell me that I had one message from Canada to the US and the other was a text message sent from the US to a US phone.

I suggested that the bill description could use some improvement and there was no way that the agent could take that input. He tried to tell me that the two different types of charges show up differently – it is obvious, isn’t it?

I thought that if it was so obvious, I wouldn’t have called, and the agent wouldn’t have needed 10 minutes to research why the two lines had different charges.

The real point of this exercise is to demonstrate the need to have a feedback loop from the call centre to examine what generates calls. What would it take to eliminate calls like this in the future? What if one line had read “Txt Msg – Canada to US” and the other said “Txt Msg – US originated”?

Simple issues like this don’t arise if telecom executives look at their own bills and read them the same way that their customers do.

At last week’s launch of the brand for Public Mobile, Alek Krstajic spoke of the cost savings associated with simple flat rate plans. When the bill is always $40, there are no calls with billing questions.

I am sure it is just my own warped sense of humour that gave me a smile when a number of parties asked the CRTC to delay one of the deadlines in its Internet Traffic Management Proceeding (PN 2008-19).

Indeed, the applications for what might be termed “applying regulatory traffic management” to the delivery of documents seemed to come precisely from those groups that are most likely to oppose the rights of internet service providers to manage their networks.

The CRTC had applications from the Consumers Groups, CIPPIC, CAIP and the Canadian Film & Television Production Association (CFTPA) who asked for delays for a variety of reasons. Among the reasons cited were difficulties in persuading administrative staff to assist on Monday, Ontario’s new Family Day holiday as well as the conflict with a CFTPA conference. In other words, these groups were prioritizing commitments and managing their workload within constrained human resource bandwidth.

the Consumer Groups submit that no party would be prejudiced by this minor adjustment to timing.

Isn’t that similar to one of the justifications for traffic management of file downloads?

Of course there are differences – but admit it, there is a certain irony in these applications, isn’ there?

In any case,the CRTC approved the extensions. Comments are due February 23.

Prior reading before submitting comments: the CRTC released a report that it commissioned entitled ISP Traffic Management Technologies: The State of the Art.

The purpose of this report is to review the state of the art in traffic management, looking in particular at current and emerging techniques and their potential for improving the ability of ISPs to manage Internet traffic.

The report canvasses the world of internet network management and importantly found that the majority of service providers do not believe that over-provisioning (the solution recommended most by those who oppose active network management) is an adequate long-term solution on its own.

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CRTC, Canada, traffic management, net neutrality, heavy reading