On Friday, Bell Mobility and Solo announced a feature that allows parents to block access to certain websites from their kids mobile devices. The content access control lets parents limit access to Internet sites that might be inappropriate for their children.

According to Adel Bazerghi, Senior Vice President of Products for Bell Mobility:

As use of the Internet on mobile phones grows, fuelled by the popularity of smartphones and the fast access speeds delivered by 3G networks, our clients have asked for tools to help them manage access. Bell Parental Control offers them content filtering capability on mobile phones for the first time in Canada.

The feature costs $5 per month.

It would be interesting to see if Bell or other service providers would support parents downloading 3rd party software to perform a similar function on the handsets.

I wonder about adding other parental controls to limit kids calling to a set list of numbers, perhaps even setting up limited call lists during peak hours. What about parental controls on the number of times users can incur premium text message charges – protecting against surprise charges for TV voting shows? Or bundling location tracking capabilities?

Deliver a complete phone-use management tool and you might have something that more parents will be happier to buy.

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Bell, net nanny

On Wednesday afternoon, I received a call from a gentleman in the western United States who was doing some due diligence into a business deal. He had been contacted by someone using a variant of my company’s name, who informed him that he was in line to inherit $7.5M.

The scam artist claimed to be a lawyer, acting as an agent for a client of National Bank in Brampton and he forwarded a letter from an account manager at the bank named Dr Smith Allen.

The phone numbers don’t match the real numbers for the bank. The law firm doesn’t exist, the lawyer doesn’t show up in the registry at the Law Society of Upper Canada and the lawyer used two similar but different street addresses; I guess it is tough to keep the storyline straight when you are making it up as you go.

Usually, these types of letters are traced to Nigeria or other far off lands. Maybe it is a sign of the slipping economy that our call centres are being re-purposed to target seniors in the US.

This message is a public service announcement to help people doing a web search for “Goldberg”, “National Bank”, “Canada”. It is a scam. And I’m not involved.

I filed a report with Phone Busters using their toll free line (+1.888.495.8501). Cathy is on the case.

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National Bank, inheritance

There are a lot of reports hitting the wires (eg. Globe and Mail or Canadian Press) on the CRTC’s Decision on the new regulatory framework for Broadcast Distribution Undertakings (eg. cable and satellite companies). The CRTC’s press release can be found here.

I’d prefer to point to a different perspective.

I took the greatest interest in reading the dissenting opinion by Commissioner Michel Morin. His dissent takes up 45 pages (of the total 141 page decision [pdf]), which he says is the longest ever written by a CRTC Commissioner.

I was appointed to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) in August 2007 for a five-year term. Today, I am issuing my sixth dissenting opinion… Believe me when I say I am not happy to be compelled to dissent from the majority opinion.

Commissioner Peter Menzies also had a dissent that takes on many of the same issues, although written in a different style. Both express concerns about the effectiveness of the local programming fund and whether the CBC should be able to draw on these amounts.

The dissenting views appear after the appendices. They can provide a fascinating peek at what some of the debates must have been during the decision making process.

Earlier in the week, I wrote about the the latest OECD broadband report which shows that as of June 2008, Canada continues to hold the number 10 position, based on connections per 100 people.

As you know, I like to view the reporting of OECD numbers with a grain of salt.

We used to gaze enviously at Korea as a pace setter for broadband connectivity. In Canada’s heyday, we were second only to Korea in broadband penetration. In the current report, the OECD points out that “Korea’s fibre penetration alone (12.2 per 100 inhabitants) is higher than total broadband penetration in 5 OECD countries.”

In preparing material for a talk next week, I noticed an interesting situation when combining a couple of the OECD’s tables.

Something is strange with Korea’s reporting of household data. I looked at the OECD’s tables for households with computers [ Excel, 50.5 KB] and households with broadband [ Excel, 37.5 KB] and tried to combine them to look at the percentage of households with computers that have broadband internet access.

One would think that homes with computers would be the asymptote for broadband penetration – why would a household subscribe to broadband if you don’t have access to a computer?

Well, apparently in Korea it doesn’t work that way. In fact, 20% of their broadband enabled households have no access to computers.

What is going on there?

When you dig deeper, it turns out that Korea’s household broadband data includes broadband enabled mobile phones. Since virtually every phone in Korea is a 3G phone, every household with a mobile phone is scored as having broadband access.

Sometimes, you need to scratch beneath the surface.

By the way, as a percentage of homes with computers, Canada’s broadband penetration ranks 6th in the OECD, behind Korea, Iceland, Japan, Belgium and Netherlands.

It strikes me that telemarketers seem to stepping up the pace in this last week before compliance with the DNCL is required. I know that I am getting a lot more calls than ever before.

Last week, a call centre in India said they were calling to “upgrade my phone service”. Well, I couldn’t very well hang up on that kind of offer, could I?

They claim to have been calling on behalf of Yootel, a VoIP company that purports to be based in Toronto, although the phone number on their website goes to a message saying “we’re sorry your call cannot be completed as dialed.”

The call centre insisted that the Yootel service would work in case of power failure, because of battery backup in the VoIP gateway device. When I asked how they would keep my broadband internet running during a power failure, the answer kept going back to the battery in the VoIP Gateway. Finally, the agent agreed to get back to me after he consulted with their technology department.

Although Yootel’s website warns that the service won’t work during power outages, the call centre was insistent that the website was wrong. They gave me a Toronto phone number that works, but it doesn’t seem to reach real people, even during normal business hours. I finally reached a live human at Yootel who confirmed that there is no battery backup – the service doesn’t work when the power is out.

Hopefully, not too many consumers are being misled by the outbound centre’s kind of sales pitch. Over the top VoIP isn’t going to work during a power failure, no matter how many times the salesman repeats that the IP gateway has a battery.

Hopefully, it won’t take a catastrophe that could damage the reputation of the entire segment. In the meantime, consumers should do their homework. With any luck, this blog posting will score high in their Google search.

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Yootel, VoIP, power