As you read here in July, Rogers’ $30 for a 6GB of 3G data was offered to customers who activated select smart phones (including the iPhone) before August 31.

Well, August 31 is this Sunday, so a question has been what comes next?

We’ll have details available at noon.

At a family function this past weekend, I saw some friends for the first time in 30 years. We had a chance to speak about the challenges of staying in touch in the good old days.

There was a time, in the not so distant past, that long distance calls were a ‘big deal.’ Sunday afternoons included the weekly ritual of phone calls to our grandparents on the east coast. Play time was punctuated by shouting to come in quickly: “It’s long distance.”

In my college days, calls to/from home were timed for 11:01 pm – those big discount periods were worth waiting for. And international long distance? You would have to choose between a nice dinner and a 3 minute call to Europe.

Now, we pick up the phone and call when we want. Most countries in the world are less than a nickel a minute, any time of day. In our house, we don’t stop to think about making a long distance call from a wired phone, especially when you consider that an hour long call is about the same price as a cup of coffee.

I wrote yesterday of the continued trend for people to cancel their residential phone service. For mobile to be a complete substitute, there is still work to be done. Most service providers offer North America calling, sold in buckets of minutes. But absent a monthly plan, mobile long distance calling in Canada or the US attracts rates reminiscent of the wired world of 20 years ago. And overseas? Don’t think about it.

This is not just a Canadian phenomenon. My US cell phone charges 5 times as much to call Canada compared to US nationwide rates. As a result, mobile phones preserve a profitable business for prepaid calling cards.

Which mobile carriers will be first to recognize the opportunity of enabling 10-10 dial access? With growing adoption of mobile substitution for residential phone service, will incumbents wait for the new mobile entrants or try a preemptive launch of more affordable global calling?

Public Works recently commissioned a study to look at households that have cut the umbilical to become ‘mobile-only.’ There were a number of news reports [eg. here].

There were some interesting numbers in the reports. For now, I’ll focus on the geographic variability: the trend is more noticeable in British Columbia – TELUS territory – with 10.2 percent of all households now relying exclusively on mobile telephony. Alberta had 7.7%, while in Bell Canada’s home base, Ontario (5.3%) and Quebec (6.3%) fared significantly better.

Despite the possibility that an ILEC’s wireless operations might retain the customers, about half of all wireless customers go to one of the ‘other companies’ in any given ILEC territory.

At Ericsson’s analyst conference, Lenovo spoke of various PC manufacturers rolling out $200-250 ‘netbook’ computers, equipped with 7-10″ screens, high speed wireless and optimized for mobile internet centric applications with long battery life.

You may not load a full version of Microsoft Office onto these machines for content creation, but the idea is to create a cross-over device – a bigger screen than smart phones.

We recently saw that Portugal is placing 500,000 such devices into its schools. Will commercial netbooks such as these supplant or supplement the one-laptop per child project?

Users may not want to activate a monthly HSPA service plan but might be interested in daily rates when travelling. Will HSPA service providers offer pay-as-you-go pricing (per day, per hour) to leverage the trend toward pervasive embedded wireless modules?

And while we are looking at alternate business models for mobile broadband, you might ponder if affordable mobile data pricing might lead to consumer electronics companies installing mobile gaming and streaming video in the backseats of our family fun wagons. Does DAVE’s affiliation with XM Canada give it a leg up in automotive distribution models?

A basic tenet of regulation is to be technology neutral. As TV migrates to personal, on-demand platforms, including over-the-top program delivery, there may be a challenge in maintaining such an agnostic philosophy.

How does regulation of traditional broadcasters evolve with an inevitable future of off-shore IPTV programming.

What do bandwidth caps mean for the evolution of video delivery alternatives? How do operators generate alternative revenue sources to deliver bandwidth enhancements, whether fixed or mobile?

Over the summer, the CRTC held a consultation on the scope of a future proceeding on Canadian broadcasting in new media. As part of that process, the CRTC commissioned a report by Two Solitudes consulting called “Changing Channels: Alternate distribution of television content.” You should read it [html].

What is the role of regulation as the market for video content evolves?

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