Tonight marks the beginning of a new era in two ways.
First off, at sunset our offices close for Rosh Hashana, the start of the Jewish New Year, which begins tonight and runs through Wednesday evening. As such, this is an abbreviated week for blog posts.
Secondly, tomorrow will see the launch of operations for the national Do Not Call List.
Telemarketing in Canada will never be the same.
Will we see an end to those annoying automated announcements offering cruises or easy credit? How many prosecutions will we actually see? How will enforcement go after off-shore operators that use VoIP to complicate tracing calls?
It looks like it will again be a year filled with interesting times. May you be inscribed in the Book of Life for a year of health, happiness, prosperity and peace.
So what do you do when your hosting company has a run of bad luck?
Last Thursday, one of my hosting companies lost POP access to my mail server and following the fix of that problem [implemented late Thursday night] FTP services went down for the next two days, not returning to service until hardware was swapped out in the early hours Sunday morning.
So, I was operating on Thursday from my Blackberry and Friday’s blog post was available only to my RSS readers. That post finally appeared on the normal site late thanks to uploading files through the backdoor web-portal.
All the up-time guarantees in the world don’t ease the frustration when you are trying to work around problems. This was the first major outage in 4 years – but, it is somewhat surprising that the system was down for almost 72 hours.
How do you manage your services to minimize risk of outages? How do you manage your service providers?
Last week, I started to review the party platforms, looking at the official positions being set forth in Canada’s upcoming elections. On Sunday, the New Democratic Party set out its platform [pdf] and telecom policy plays a more prominent role than we saw from the Liberals or Green Party last week.
Like the Greens and Liberals, the NDP are promising to introduce new legislation “to prevent the publication or proliferation of child sexual abuse content on the Internet.” The NDP has joined the Green Party in promising to regulate the internet. The NDP go further than simply looking at regulating traffic; they plan to regulate prices as well.
Implement “net neutrality” to protect everyday Canadians’ right to freely access the internet content of their choice at a flat rate and with clear and transparent rules. We will end price gouging and “net throttling”, preventing a two-tiered internet in Canada.
The NDP are the first party to mention plans to improve access to broadband internet:
Invest in a pan-Canadian broadband strategy to bring high-speed internet to more communities in Canada.
The NDP also plan to combat identity theft, control online computer fraud, including spamming and “phishing,” working to implement new measures to fight cyber-crime. The party also addresses new media with a promise to strengthen the delivery of new internet-based media services from CBC and Radio Canada.
The NDP, through such members as MP Charlie Angus, has been active in raising the awareness of telecom issues in the most recent session of Parliament. Although I often disagree with their positions, I admire the focus in the coverage of telecommunications issues as evidenced in their platform document.
Three years after then CEO Bill Owens spoke of how Nortel would defend its markets from the threat of competition from ZTE and Huawei, an article from Light Reading suggests that Huawei may be the most likely candidate to acquire Nortel’s Metro Ethernet Network division.
Earlier this year, Huawei’s attempt to purchase 3Com was derailed by US national security concerns about Huawei’s ties to the Chinese military.
Nortel has deployed a lot of metro optical equipment in local exchange carrier networks in Canada and around the world, serving government clients, including defense and intelligence organizations.
To what extent will national security concerns in Canada and the US play a role in Nortel’s divestment plans?
Some of the study findings seem to contradict conventional wisdom that berates Canada’s international broadband rankings.
The CIP study finds that Canada is actually a world leader in Internet usage:
In comparison to the rest of the world, Canadians continue to be among the heaviest Internet users. Internet penetration increased by 6 percent to 78 percent in 2007. The average number of hours spent online also increased from 13 in 2004 to 17 hours per week in 2007. Canadian Internet users are typically very experienced and have been online for an average of nine years.
The Canadian Internet Project is a research initiative of the Canadian Media Research Consortium, under the direction of Prof Charles Zamaria (Ryerson University) and Dr Fred Fletcher (York University) in partnership with: Heritage Canada and the Treasury Board Secretariat, the Ontario Media Development Corporation, Telefilm Canada, Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada, Bell University Labs, eBay, CBC, and the CRTC.
The study found that Canada ranks number one for Internet engagement by its eldest citizens. According to the report, Canadians over 60 years are not just using e-mail and search engines, but are also engaging in activities more similar to what their grandchildren are doing, such as social networks and posting online content.
However, a language divide became markedly apparent, with adoption of only 67% of French-speaking Canadians versus 82% of English-speaking Canadians. The gender gap has pretty much disappeared (80% of males are online, 77% of females), but males were found to have been more actively engaged in a greater diversity of activities and applications on-line.
