It is the nightmare scenario for every telephone service provider.

What happens if an emergency service call doesn’t get routed the way customers expect?

A story out of Calgary is pointing to a breakdown in communications that may have contributed to the death of a toddler.

Are customers fully aware of how their service provider handles emergency calls? Do they know about risks associated with power-outages?

This appears to be another are where full disclosure and transparency is critical. Most consumers have options, including mobile phones, if their voice service provider can’t handle 9-1-1, but they need to be fully informed. In many cases, the purchaser of the phone service may know about limitations, but their baby sitter may not realize what is happening to their call.

Will all forms of VoIP (fixed cable; nomadic; PC-based) all get lumped together in the minds of consumers?

Communications Direct from PwC is among the on-line digests that I like to scan.

There was a recent story about research by Nokia, working with Berkeley and Rutgers, that uses GPS-enabled mobile phones to monitor real-time traffic flow while preserving phone users’ privacy. Using data uploaded from the phones to estimate speeds and travel times, researchers are able to picture real-time traffic conditions.

The article also has a brief discussion of how privacy concerns have been accommodated.

While commercial launch hasn’t been announced, when it becomes available, the environmental and economic benefits could be substantial. In the U.S. alone, traffic congestion leads to 4.2B hours in extra travel time, an extra 2.9B gallons of fuel, for a total cost of $78 billion.

Theresa Tedesco, Chief business correspondent for The National Post will be the moderator of a panel looking at Green IT at The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit on June 16.

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Green IT

It seems that problems with busy period engineering affects the government as well as the private sector.

Canada Revenue Agency has had to extend the deadline for e-filing tax returns because its servers have had trouble keeping up with traffic loads this week. It is a scene reminiscent of Boxing Day blues for some Canadian retailers.

An announcement showed up on the CRA website yesterday, announcing an extension to May 6 – for e-Filers only (I am linking to a CBC News page because CRA’s home page is so bogged down, we don’t need to contribute to their trouble).

I was doing some business research on CRA’s website yesterday and noticed painfully slow response times. I’m waiting for someone to comment that CRA should blame their ISP for traffic shaping.

It certainly raises questions about CRA’s web architecture when even information pages can’t be reached.

The subject of net neutrality came up in a meeting I had yesterday and the conversation turned to current affairs in Canada and various hearings in the US.

Our discussion included an examination of the vocabulary being used in the discourse and one of the meeting participants spoke of network fairness associated with the intelligent management of traffic.

Some would have the network treat all bits as they come – first come, first serve without any triage even in times of peak network loading. Such people say that the carriers just need to pry additional capital from their wretched fingers: invest in more network assets and then there will be no congestion.

I read lots of comments from people who believe we just need the government to nationalize the access networks – that will fix things. That camp believes that a benevolent government will pour whatever capital resources are required to provide limitless capacity.

Hospitals, a public resource in this country at least, experience times that emergency rooms are crowded and other times that there is no waiting time. We don’t expect hospitals to take patients on a first come, first served basis. We expect the emergency room to prioritize patients based on their condition – their tolerance of latency.

There are off peak periods – increasingly rare – where even sore throats get seen without delay. But during the rest of the day, we still consider it to be fair to apply intelligent emergency room management.

Is network fairness a more important goal than an unachievable network neutrality?

We’ll be looking at all aspects of net neutrality at a special session at The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit on June 18.

Technorati Tags:
net neutrality, Canada, network fairness

In a statement released this morning about the iPhone, Rogers has announced that it has reached an agreement with Apple to launch later this year.

Ted Rogers is quoted in the very brief statement, saying:

We’re thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year. We can’t tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned.

As I wrote recently, there appears to be imminent plans to release an upgrade to the current iPhone.

Wouldn’t it be great for Canada to be part of the launch of iPhone 2.0?