Michael Geist’s column in the Toronto Star this week joins our call for the government to examine a national connectedness strategy as a way to use the windfall from the spectrum auction, as bidding approaches the $4B mark.

He suggests three uses, among them:

Third, a large chunk of the surplus could be allocated toward fulfilling the goal of ensuring that all Canadians enjoy access to high-speed networks. Canada’s broadband global ranking has been steadily declining in recent years with one-third of Canadian communities still without high-speed access. For those Canadians without access – whether in rural areas, or on the outskirts of major cities – the Internet’s potential for communication, commerce, access to knowledge and culture remains largely unrealized.

As Michael Sone and I suggested in our opening remarks at The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit, the digital divide is not just a matter of connecting communities, but helping lower income Canadians get on-line, regardless of where they live.

As I asked in the opening remarks, will broadband policy find a place on the election platforms of various political parties this fall?

The CRTC rejected an appeal by MTS Allstream of a couple of earlier Centrex forbearance decisions, Decisions 2007-80 and 2008-10.

MTS Allstream had argued that these Decisions had the effect of foreclosing any possibility of sustainable competition in Centrex services. It said that maintaining these Decisions would cause irreversible damage to competition.

Among its arguments, MTS Allstream provided evidence that showed that ILECs had in excess of 95 percent market share of business local exchange services to large and very large business customers. MTS Allstream claimed that the ILECs had “significant market power” in Centrex services as seen by the ability to raise prices as much as 19 percent within a year, with no loss of ILECs’ market share.

However, the Commission found that the market share data submitted by MTS Allstream was inconclusive. For example, the data submitted by MTS Allstream did not separate the in-territory from out-of-territory regions where ILECs operate as competitors.

The Commission remains of the view that market share is but one measure of competition. The Commission considers that competitor presence is widely accepted in economics and competition law as a measure of a market’s competitiveness and notes that it was the required test in the local forbearance framework set out in modified Telecom Decision 2006-15.

The Commission noted that the forbearance framework for wholesale services would ensure that competitors have access to inputs needed to compete in retail markets, independent of the regulatory determinations in the retail market. And of course, the Commission retains its powers to address issues related to undue preference and unjust discrimination.

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Peter Nowak continued his outstanding coverage of The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit by conducting an interview with Sandvine co-founder, president and CEO, Dave Caputo, following the Wednesday morning Net Neutrality panel.

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At the end of the day on Thursday, bidding for AWS spectrum cracked through $3.9B and it seems to keep creeping up almost $5M per round. At that pace, we will get close to, but not quite at the $4B level before the week is through. I have already written about my thoughts on how the government might reinvest its windfall in enhancing accessibility to broadband by lower income Canadians. I noticed coverage in Tech Media Reports as well.

At the Canadian Telecom Summit on Tuesday, Ken Engelhart did some quick arithmetic to show that the amounts are in line with valuations in recent auctions in other countries – it’s just that his comparables were for different frequency bands.

Still, we can be confident that the business plans still justify the levels. The question of where will all the capital come from remains. How many global players have stayed away because of foreign ownership restrictions?

While there are certainly legal constructs that can allow companies to satisfy a license review, how many companies have stayed clear of such games because they tend to believe that if they are putting up most of the bucks, they should get to control the board?

Would a loosening of foreign ownership restrictions result in even more competitive service providers?

I have been a little tied up for the past few days so I am grateful that my blogging colleagues, veteran journalists Peter Nowak and David George-Cosh have been providing such outstanding coverage of The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit in their roles as writers at CBC Online and The National Post respectively.

Their posts provided complementary coverage of Wednesday’s speakers. Peter talks about the keynote addresses early in the day from Robert Depatie and Pierre Blouin; David covers Competition Bureau chief Sheridan Scott’s address late in the afternoon. David also asks an important question arising from M. Depatie’s keynote.

The event is now over. Thank you to the delegates and sponsors for your support. Thank you to the speakers for imparting your experience to our attendees. And thank you, David and Peter for assisting in bringing news of the event’s proceedings to the rest of the public that couldn’t make it there in person.

The dates for next year’s 2009 Canadian Telecom Summit will be June 15-17, 2009 and we expect to be in Toronto.

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