I was struck by a story about PEI’s agreement to provide funding to Aliant to make broadband internet available to 100% of the residents of the island province.

The agreement calls for the provincial government to give Aliant $8.2M to help with the cost of serving areas that were presumably beyond the cost-effective reach of Aliant’s network.

I think it is great that Canada will have a province with 100% broadband access.

But PEI may end up being a great case study of how our current approach to broadband access is leading citizens to the fountain without helping them find it worth taking a drink.

I started doing some arithmetic. According to recent Statistics Canada figures, there are about 50,000 households in the whole province. The most recent CRTC monitoring report [pdf] indicates that PEI already enjoys among the highest broadband rankings in Canada with service available to about 95% of the households. The Monitoring Report also shows that PEI already had the highest level of availability of broadband in rural markets.

So that means that the $8.2M is actually going to subsidize making service available to fewer than 5000 households – a subsidy of more than $1800 each, assuming that every home will be reachable: the backgrounder to the press release indicates that Aliant is committing to providing service to any Islander who wants it.

In the announcement, the premier is quoted justifying the sole source procurement, saying that 25% of Islanders are without access to broadband service, seemingly contradicting CRTC numbers.

It is estimated that more than 25 percent of Islanders and rural businesses do not have access to high speed internet

An Aliant press release issued 6 years earlier that shows that even in 2002, 80% of the Island had access, which doesn’t include any that might be covered by any of Aliant’s competitors or continued investment in recent years. The numbers just don’t jive.

Here is the real rub. Despite having some of the highest levels of access to broadband internet, PEI has the lowest adoption of service at only 43%. Well under half the people who could have broadband internet are finding it worth paying for. What is going on with PEI adoption rates?

Despite news reports that pricing in rural PEI will match the prices in what PEI considers to be urban areas, adoption rates seem to indicate that regular prices aren’t good enough to get people excited about getting connected.

Using 2006 census data, we can see that PEI has a higher percentage of households (89%) receiving government transfers than the national average (84%). The average transfer per household ($8000) amounts to double the national average ($4000). As such, I wonder if the problem in PEI may be affordability.

Policy makers need to look beyond the raw numbers of people who have access to DSL or cable-based broadband. We need to be concerned about the affordability of service to lower income Canadians regardless of where they live.

PEI doesn’t have as much of a problem with broadband access as it has with broadband adoption.

I think it is going to require a new approach to get Islanders to go online.

I received an invitation to try a new messaging application and I am impressed with it so far.

VoxOx ties together all of your instant messaging applications (MSN, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, etc.) and your social networking messages (Facebook, etc.) together with webmail (GMail, Hotmail, etc). Add to that an incoming phone number that can ring to your desktop or be forwarded to a list of “Find-me” type numbers. The number also receives faxes and voice messages which get sent to you as email attachments.

No, I don’t get anything from this referral.

I just thought I’d share what could be a promising application. Others have pulled together various IM apps under a single log-in; this one is the first I have seen that reaches into the various social networking sites as well.

With activation, you get credits for up to 2 hours of calling. However, if you sign up and then refer from inside the application, you will get another 2 hours of calling credits for each friends that signs up.

Try it out. VoxOx may help you recover some space on your computer desktop.

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Voxox

A couple weeks ago, the McGill Tribune waded in over its head when it decided to write about whether the CRTC should regulate aspects of the internet.

I was left confused; unable to determine whether or not the Tribune wants the CRTC to intervene.

Here is how the piece started:

Back in 1999, in a rare and uncharacteristic display of good sense, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission announced: “Our message is clear. We are not regulating any portion of the Internet.” [link to CRTC press release added]

Cheap shot: a populist kind of backhanded compliment – “a rare and uncharacteristic display of good sense” – but the Tribune seems to be applauding a hands off approach to regulating any portion of the internet.

The Tribune introduces the New Media proceeding and puts it in the context of the soon-to-be-released decision on CAIP’s application:

The CRTC recently announced that it will hold hearings to investigate the possible regulation of “new media” in Canada. The announcement comes as the CRTC is deliberating whether or not Internet service providers have the right to throttle bandwidth based on the content clients are accessing. These are both troubling developments.

Note that the Tribune says that the CRTC is deliberating on whether ISPs have the right to throttle based on the content being accessed. Actually, such a case is not in front of the Commission.

The case in front of the CRTC is looking at managing traffic based on a class of applications: peer-to-peer file transfers, regardless of the content. That is an important distinction. Even the Toronto Star makes this same mistake in its article on Monday about New Media subsidies:

In recent months, many Canadian ISPs have engaged in “network management practices” that degrades the bandwidth allocated to certain applications and content.

No ISP has asked for such a right. To my knowledge, no Canadian ISP degrades bandwidth allocated based on the content. What is the basis for such a statement?

The Tribune editorial staff continues to throws stones through literary simile:

Of course, listening to the CRTC talk about regulating the Internet is like watching Don Quixote joust with windmills: neither of them has the slightest idea what they’re up against.

The CRTC has a far deeper understanding of issues associated with the internet than that demonstrated by the editorial board of the McGill Tribune. Despite its ill-informed insult cast toward Gatineau, the Tribune seems to want the CRTC to intervene in ISPs managing traffic loads. I am left confused by the Tribune’s Quixotic tilt.

The Tribune makes other errors, such as its statement about what the CRTC regulates:

Because the CRTC’s jurisdiction only extends over Canadian-operated websites, the negative impacts of regulation will be limited to Canadian content – a cruel irony for an agency whose goal is to “ensure that all Canadians have access to a wide variety of high quality Canadian programming.”

The CRTC’s jurisdiction over websites is at best indirect – by regulating connectivity. This could theoretically be applied to any website. On the other hand, the CRTC can direct funding to stimulate the production of Canadian content, one of the key themes being explored in the New Media proceeding.

Giving Internet service providers the ability to prioritize or block traffic makes them the judge of what Canadians should see.

No and no. This simple statement sounds great if you say it fast enough but it is wrong on two counts: First, there is a difference between prioritizing and blocking: ISPs already have the ability to prioritize traffic and most internet users demand that they exercise such prioritization (who would argue with VoIP calls taking priority over bulk file downloads?). Second, there is a difference between determining what should be blocked and doing the blocking: for example, most Canadian ISPs block content that is determined to be child abuse. The judge is completely independent of them.

The Tribune also seems to think that the internet is some kind of amorphous cloud:

But the Internet is neither Canadian, nor a broadcaster. It’s an international network, and the “old media” rules don’t apply to online content. There are no broadcast licenses to issue and no channels or signals to prioritize.

The part of the internet to which Canadians connect is indeed running on Canadian-owned transmission facilities under the jurisdiction of the CRTC. If it wants to, the CRTC has many weapons in its arsenal with which to address various aspects of Internet regulation.

So, why am I taking on an opinion piece in a student paper, you ask?

Because I think it is important that we get the facts right on issues as important as net neutrality. Since some like to point to having mobilized thousands of supporters using on-line tools, it is important to address errors in emotive articles – whether in the McGill Tribune or the Toronto Star. It is far too easy for people to keep repeating the error often enough so that suddenly people believe it is true.

The Tribune seemed to view the issue through some form of polarized lenses, oscillating between black and white. There are a lot of shades between prioritizing and blocking; between stimulating Canadian content and blocking foreign material.

With so many colours in the rainbow, the Tribune only presented black and white. With that limited palette, they still got the colours wrong.

As was anticipated in a number of reports, Nortel announced further restructuring and job cuts yesterday.

An article in the weekend Globe and Mail questioned the wisdom of pre-announcing the intent to sell one its top performing divisions, the Metro Ethernet Networks group. Yesterday’s results confirmed that 3rd quarter sales have slipped and at least some of that has to be attributed to customer uncertainty about where the division is heading.

Earlier this fall, some had speculated that Huawei is among the most likely suitors.

A challenge for Huawei in operating in North America is the need to establish a domestic supply chain. Huawei is able to send products produced in China into Canada or the United States. However, US export controls puts some restrictions on shipping high tech items back to China.

This adds a bit of a wrinkle into normal vendor “return and repair” of equipment that needs maintenance. How will Huawei work through the challenges as it ramps up its operations in Canada?

What impact might this have on Huawei’s ability to acquire parts of Nortel? To what extent do parts of Nortel provide Huawei with a strategic solution, helping to accelerate its western growth.

Who else might come to the auction for Nortel’s best assets?

The Washington / London based law firm of Arnold & Porter has just released a paper [ pdf] that discusses recent developments in net neutrality in the United States. The piece is a chapter in an upcoming book: Telecommunications Laws and Regulations 2009.

The piece is an excellent review of the Comcast case in front of the FCC, presented with a history and a review of the jurisdictional questions.

According to the paper, the issue isn’t whether ISPs can manage their internet traffic. It cites a Federal Trade Commission, (the US federal regulatory agency with jurisdiction to enforce antitrust and consumer protection laws) report that said:

the use of bandwidth intensive applications like certain peer-to-peer file-sharing protocols by even a small minority of users is already consuming too many network resources as to be worrisome … [and] even a small portion of Internet users may effectively degrade service for the majority of end users.

Rather, the issue is whether those ISPs should be free to address this problem without government involvement to guard against improper limits on public access to the Internet content.

The advice to ISPs in the interim is to provide consumers with relevant information about limits on their use of their service, but it is unclear how much detail must be provided; and, to apply network management techniques that are “narrowly tailored” to meet the harms they are designed to address.

The Comcast case is far from over. As was noted in the Arnold & Porter paper, “the lack of a factual basis for the conclusion that Comcast was acting discriminatorily may prove problematic for the Commission.”

It would be nice to see a similar review of net neutrality in Canada. References, anyone?

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net neutrality, Arnold & Porter