Earlier this week, Tech Mahindra and British Telecom signed another strategic sourcing agreement valued at $350M over 5 years, under which BT will be provided with application maintenance and support for business critical BSS and OSS platforms.

As I wrote last month, Tech Mahindra and BT have a long history of strategic sourcing projects.

Strategic sourcing is the theme of a session being led by John Chang of PricewaterhouseCoopers on Monday June 16 at The Canadian Telecom Summit. In addition, CP Gurnani, the international operations president of Tech Mahindra, will be speaking in a session with Clive Selley, the CIO of BT Wholesale to end the day on June 17. Their session will look at how British Telecom has restructured to compete domestically and globally.

Which Canadian carriers will pick up on this trend?

The Federal Court of Appeal (FCA) has upheld the CRTC’s Deferral Account Decision.

A year ago, Cabinet rejected an appeal. The question remains whether Bell may appeal the FCA decision to the Supreme Court.

There were actually two appellants in the FCA case – Bell and the Consumers’ Association of Canada. As the Court summarized the case:

Both appeals raise issues as to the scope of the authority of the CRTC to order the disposition of the balance of a deferral account created pursuant to a prior CRTC order. Bell Canada says that the CRTC cannot order it to use the balance of the account for subscriber rebates. Consumers’ Association of Canada and National Anti-Poverty Organization (collectively, the “Consumers”) say that the CRTC must order the balance to be used for subscriber rebates (or to improve accessibility to telecommunication services for persons with disabilities).

You can read the ruling for its rationale, but the FCA said that the CRTC was acting within its jurisdiction in reaching the conclusions set out in Decision 2006-9 (a little more than 2 years ago) when it told the ILECs to set aside 5% of the deferral funds for accessibility projects, develop rural broadband plans for the rest.

Funds that weren’t approved under the broadband initiative will get paid back to you and me.

In a first year Philosophy course, I remember studying logic. As my youngest child is preparing to graduate university next month, you’ll forgive me for reminiscing to my class more than 30 years ago. One of the principles was using an existence proof in order to disprove a tautology.

An example: Your friend claims that all sports cars are red. But then you see a bright yellow Corvette. You must conclude that either a Corvette isn’t a sports car or the statement isn’t true. We’ll leave the debate over cars to another time – I just want you to get the idea.

This week, Michael Geist writes in the Toronto Star that Business in the hotseat over Net censorship.

In reading the article, I sensed an implicit hypothesis that all forms of internet censorship are bad. I disagree and I will use my Philosophy of Logic class to counter the statement.

Subject to appropriate checks and balances, the overwhelming majority of us agree that child exploitation images should be censored by ISPs. And the vast majority of Canadian internet service providers do just that using Cleanfeed.

With China now boasting the largest number of Internet users in the world, the uncomfortable reality is that hundreds of millions of global Internet users face some level of censorship. That leaves governments and business in the hotseat, since routing around today’s Net censorship will require far more than a technological fix.

With Cleanfeed, we can see an existence of a counter-example to the tautology that ‘all network censorship is wrong’. I disagree that there is an “uncomfortable” reality of hundreds of millions of users facing some level of censorship. I have asked before why we believe there should be a digital loophole for illegal content.

Internet censorship, sanctioned – and perhaps even required – by our own national laws, is a reality. Why should we be more uncomfortable with it than with censorship of any other medium? Perhaps Canadians may find greater discomfort that researchers are working to find ways to access illegal content, as described in the Star article or as I described a couple years ago.

We know there is at least one form of content being blocked that our own democratic society deems to be justifiable. Shouldn’t the discussion include examining the criteria for applying limits on content?

Today’s National Post has an editorial about the Ryerson Facebook affair [For background, you can refer to a Toronto Star story, and Michael Geist’s blog].

As the Post title suggests: Ryerson’s ‘Facebook scandal’ isn’t about Facebook, it’s about cheating.

The technological angle is causing everyone to overlook the vastly more meaningful development symbolized by the affair. Apparently, in the year 2008, professors find it necessary to specify that homework problems in an engineering class should be solved by the student, rather than copied from a brighter classmate.

In this case, the prof told students to do their work independently. An internet based study group, is a study group. Sounds to me like a violation of the instructions.

Read the Post editorial. I’m working on another piece for tomorrow about so-called digital loopholes.

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Update [March 18, 8:30 pm]
The National Post is reporting that the student has not been expelled, but has received a zero out of 10 for the portion of the class mark associated with independent assignments. He will also be required to attend a course on academic integrity.

As James Norrie, director of Ryerson’s school of information technology management said “It is incredible to us that our desire to protect academic integrity, even if it occurs in a technology-based setting, would lead some to the conclusion that we are behind the curve.”

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National Post, Facebook, Ryerson, digital loophole

Once again, the CRTC has decided to give an ILEC a “get out of jail free” card for a couple cable cuts that caused an extraordinary hit on their quality of service indicators. In this instance, the CRTC ruled that Sasktel was not responsible for two fibre cuts caused by trucks hitting aerial cables.

On first blush, I was surprised with the decision. I figured that the cables were too low for the truck traffic to get through – in which case, it would be hard to understand how the CRTC concluded that the

failure to meet the competitor Q of S standard was caused in that month by events beyond the reasonable control of the ILEC.

The write-up in the decision didn’t give enough information. However, by going back to the original application, you can see that Sasktel was able to confirm that their cables were at the proper height – at least 15 feet off the ground.

In one case, the fibre was cut by a truck that forgot to lower its boom before exiting the storage yard. In the other case, the city failed to notify Sasktel that there were going to be oversized vehicles passing under an aerial cable.

As a result, TELUS was not entitled compensation from Sasktel for the service degradation.

Should carriers litigate against parties for their negligence in cutting fibre routes?rel=”tag”>Sasktel