On Monday, the CRTC rejected an appeal by Bell Aliant / Bell Canada that had questioned the way the CRTC calculated competitor share of the business services access market.

The way the calculations go, the CRTC has the ILEC provide its number of buildings in a wire centre with at least one high speed connection and each competitor provides its number of buildings with at least one high speed connection. The CRTC rules, set up in Footnote 7 of Decision 2007-35, say that at least 30% of the buildings need to have a competitor presence, but the method of calculation is described as:

competitor network presence is the ratio of buildings connected to the competitors’ highspeed DNA capable network, divided by the total number of buildings connected to all service providers’ high speed DNA capable networks. Multiple competitor connections to a building are counted as one connection, while ILEC and competitor connections to a building are counted as two connections.

You can get some strange but consistent results from this formula. Let’s say there are 25 buildings in a wire centre and the ILEC is in all of them and there is a competitor in 10 of them. One might think that this surpasses the 30% threshold (10/25 = 40%) but that isn’t how CRTC arithmetic works. According to the CRTC, the competitor presence is 10/35 = 28.6%.

The CRTC’s rationale is that the calculation is the same without having to consider whether the competitors are in the same buildings as ILECs – an important potential labour saver in doing the calculations.

For example, in a wire centre in which the competitors’ high-speed DNA-capable network is connected to 10 buildings and the ILEC is connected to 30 buildings, adopting Bell Canada et al.’s approach would lead to an assessment of competitor network presence ranging from 25 percent to 33 percent – 25 percent under a scenario in which the buildings reached by the ILEC and the competitors are entirely exclusive of each other and 33 percent under a scenario in which the ILEC’s high-speed DNA network is connected in all buildings reached by the competitors.

However, the CRTC calculations do consider whether multiple competitors are in the same building (and counts them just once). Let’s say in this CRTC example there are two competitors, each connected to 5 buildings. The results will range from 14% to 33%, depending on whether the competitors are mutually exclusive of each other.

According to the CRTC in its rejection of the Bell / Bell Aliant appeal:

The Commission notes that from the perspective of market power analysis, an approach that provides a consistent assessment for an identical number of competitor network connections, regardless of the particular configuration of the networks of the ILEC and the competitors, is to be favoured over an approach that does not.

It is not clear to me that the CRTC’s math is any more consistent. The Commission’s methodology also needs to consider the configuration of the competitor networks.

Just not sure how clearly this all adds up.

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Fixed mobile convergence is the common industry term for handsets and technology that allows inter-operable communications flow between mobile devices and a fixed network. It allows customers to roam-to-home: avoiding mobile network charges when the handset is used to originate calls within range of a WiFi network.

Rogers is continuing to leverage its GSM infrastructure advantage to launch innovative devices ahead of its competitors. Tomorrow, Rogers will be formally announcing its first fixed-mobile converged handsets – allowing customers to roam from mobile onto WiFi networks – and Rogers will announce its Fido Uno and Rogers Home Zone rate plans.

These are plans that make more sense for Rogers than its competitors, since Rogers is less likely than Bell or TELUS to be cannibalizing its wireline home phone revenues.

Rogers has bundled in a voice optimized WiFi router at no extra charge. Their router is designed to simplify the security pairing between the handset and the home network and its features are said to improves battery life on the mobile handset.

The service allows UMA-equipped handsets to hand-off calls seamlessly between the WiFi / GSM networks. Billing will be based on where the call originates – calls started on WiFi will be free for their duration; calls started on the mobile network will incur charges for the duration. The service allows use of any WiFi network when located in Canada, but it is especially easy to synch with the WiFi router supplied by Rogers.

In case you were wondering, emergency calls will be handled by the mobile network, not VoIP, even when the phone is in its WiFi mode.

Is this UMA product launch another step in preparing Rogers for the launch of iPhone 2.0?

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Update [May 6, 11:10 pm]
See Peter Nowak’s take on this story, which includes an interview with me, in his posting on CBC online.

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Rogers, FMC

>We have received word that Professor David Johnston, president of University of Waterloo, has confirmed that he will join the cadre of distinguished keynote speakers at The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit.

Besides having served on many provincial and federal task forces, he chaired the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Federal Government’s Information Highway Advisory Council and its Blue Ribbon Panel on Smart Communities. More recently, he chaired the National Task Force on High Speed Broadband Access and the Broadband National Selection Committee.

Among other things, he will be speaking about a couple projects underway at Waterloo that are enabling a peek into the future of information and communications technology and services. The University has launched a Media and Mobility Network Project, to provide its students with access to the most advanced communications, media access, mobile computing and network services.

In September, the school will open its VeloCity dorm: a place where some of its most talented, creative and entrepreneurial students will be brought together under one roof to work on the future of communications, web and new media.

David Johnston will be speaking on Tuesday morning, June 17 at The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit.

Craig McTaggart from TELUS released a paper last week at the Law Society of Upper Canada’s National Conference on New Developments in Communications Law and Policy.

It is a scholarly approach to examining Net Neutrality and Canada’s Telecommunications Act and it is worth reading.

Craig begins with an examination of the legitimate concerns of 4 stakeholders:

• internet users, concerned about whether they will be able to continue to experience the Internet in the manner in which they have in the past;
• content and application providers, concerned about potential changes to the terms on which they reach their audiences while anticipating upgrades to infrastructure to enable even better applications and services;
• ISPs, concerned about dealing with technological change disrupting their economic assumptions and searching for ways to differentiate themselves; and,
• governments, wanting to ensure public access to robust, competitive telecommunications services and under pressure to appear to act in respect of net neutrality concerns prior to significant problems arising or harm to consumers being proven.

As you have read on this website before, Craig asserts that there is already sufficient legislation in Canada for the CRTC to safeguard consumers’ interests, although he appears to disagree with FCC Chair Martin on whether the same holds true for the United States:

this paper seeks to demonstrate that, unlike in the United States, Canada’s existing Telecommunications Act provides the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) the authority it needs to address any problems that may arise.

The paper concludes that Sections 27(2) and 36 of the Telecom Act are sufficient to provide protections for all stakeholders’ interests and allow the Internet to evolve as it always has.

There is no need for premature legislation that would prejudge what models of Internet access will best satisfy Canadian Internet users’ diverse preferences in the future.

On June 18, The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit will host a panel discussion looking at Net Neutrality.

I find that I can usually tell when there are escalated levels of malicious activity on the internet because there are multiple updates of my virus definition files in a single day.

With a growing number of internet service providers moving to impose download caps on their broadband service, it seems to me that there are going to need to be carve outs for certain kinds of downloads, such as anti-virus and operating system software updates.

It is in the best interests of the service providers for their users to keep machines current.

I don’t think the ISPs want users to even consider deactivating their automatic update features as a means to preserve from headroom on their download caps. Such a move would inevitably drive more activity to their call centres and increase the likelihood of infected devices on the edge of their networks.

And that isn’t in anyone’s interest.

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Update [May 2, 3:10 pm]
Peter Nowak looks at download caps from a different perspective in his posting today on CBC online. His article asks “Are download limits anti-competitive?“

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