The Nielsen ratings are coming in for Sunday’s Super Bowl match and it appears that the Giants’ victory over New England was the most watched TV show in almost 25 years. Not since the final episode of M*A*S*H in 1983 have so many Americans shared in the experience of a single program.

We know that the Super Bowl is a perennial pleaser for broadcasters; Fox was charging $2.7M per 30 second spot for advertising. Still, I wonder what lessons can be found for those contemplating the role of broadcasting in the future, as viewers find so many other places to plant their eyeballs.

The ratings were bolstered by viewers cheering for or against the possibility of New England finishing the season 19-0; a great last quarter; and the sacrifice of so many New Year’s resolution diets because of the inability to eat chili dogs without friends, beer and chips.

While new media is able to deliver content that targets the needs of the individual – when you want it, where ever you want to receive it – the Super Bowl ratings show that broadcasting is effective at delivering programming to the masses.

Regardless of the popularity of Facebook and other new media social networking sites, the Super Bowl numbers demonstrate the power of broadcast TV, a relatively old medium, to bring us together with family and friends for personal interaction.

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Super Bowl

Your phone numbers are yours, not the phone company’s. All of your phone numbers – even if the numbers are ‘out-of-territory’ or secondary numbers.

On Friday, the CRTC maintained its consumer focus in a decision that reaffirmed that providers of VoIP services

continue to be required to port out telephone numbers, assigned from both inside and outside of their operating territory, to other VoIP service providers or to other telecommunications service providers, including local exchange carriers and wireless service providers.

The issue had been that some service providers thought that local number portability should apply just to primary phone numbers in a customer’s local area.

VoIP has enabled people to get phone numbers from all over the country and indeed, from all over the world, and have all of these numbers ring various devices that the customer directs.

Service providers are required to release phone numbers to customers that are leaving. The Commission does not require service providers to allow customers to bring numbers with them, but those service providers do so at their own peril. As the decision states:

In the Commission’s view, service providers who do not support or minimally support porting-in of telephone numbers will self limit their ability to attract new customers.

In effect, the CRTC’s decision confirms the customer in control, consistent with the intent of recent policy pronouncements.

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CRTC, VoIP, LNP

What does the Microsoft / Yahoo deal mean for Canada’s two largest internet service providers?

Bell’s Sympatico has hitched itself to Microsoft’s MSN and Rogers is aligned with Yahoo.

If and when Microsoft and Yahoo consummate their deal and begin to wring out their $1B in synergies, what happens to the differentiation between rivals in other markets?

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Microsoft, Yahoo, Rogers, Bell, Sympatico

Nortel CTO John Roese set out 4 predictions for 2008 in his blog posting this week. He invites his readers to provide their thoughts on what we might expect to see in telecom and IT in 2008.

In many ways, these predictions resonate with some of the themes that I have laid out over the past year:

1. The arrival of WiMax and LTE
2. Unified Communications overtaking VoIP
3. Spectrum Policy diversity leads to multi-mode devices
4. Cranking it up a notch for wireline and optical internet

I have written extensively about Barrett Xplore rolling out wireless broadband solutions to under-served parts of the country. Will WiMax and other fixed wireless technologies, coupled with satellite, provide the solution to universal accessibility to broadband?

Unified Communications allows VoIP to deliver more than PoIP – POTS over IP. Martha Bejar from Microsoft will be delivering the closing keynote address on the first day of The Canadian Telecom Summit, June 16.

We have now seen T-Mobile and AT&T; leverage their WiFi hot-spot assets as a means to supplement mobile data networks. In Canada, the wireless carriers have not yet seen WiFi as a competitive differentiator; instead, to date, WiFi assets have been made available to each other’s customers. Will unlimited data plans bring a change to how WiFi is strategically deployed in Canada?

A year ago this week, Videotron launched DOCSIS 3.0 powered 100Mbps cable modem service. Which of the Canadian telephone companies will be first to follow Verizon into a residential fibre optic based solution? Robert Depatie of Videotron will again be a keynote speaker at The Canadian Telecom Summit on June 18.

What other themes do you think will emerge in 2008?

The CRTC’s decision earlier this week (2008-6) has a clear listing of Telemarketing rules in its Appendix.

These are actually quite useful for consumers and callers alike as a single collection point for all of the current regulations applying to unsolicited calls, whether from live humans, fax broadcasts or those pesky automatic dialing announcement devices.

Among other items, it clarifies the requirements for those fax broadcast people who, I think get paid by the maker of my fax machine (in order to help them sell more toner cartridges).

A telemarketer sending a fax telemarketing telecommunication shall clearly provide the following information at the top of the first page in font size 12 or larger:

(a) the name of the telemarketer sending the fax, whether the telemarketing telecommunication is made on its own behalf or on behalf of a client of the telemarketer;

(b) the name of the client when the telemarketing telecommunication is being made on behalf of a client of the telemarketer;

(c) the originating date and time of the fax;

(d) a voice and a fax telecommunications number that allows access to an employee or other representative of the telemarketer and, where applicable, the client of the telemarketer, for the purpose of asking questions, making comments about the telemarketing telecommunication, or making or verifying a do not call request; and

(e) the name and address of an employee or other representative of the telemarketer and, where applicable, the client of the telemarketer, to whom the consumer can write for the purpose of asking questions, making comments about the fax, or making or verifying a do not call request.

Right. I have never received this much information in the entire junk fax, let alone all at the top in “font size 12”.

Like voice-based telemarketers, how will any of these rules stop unwanted communications that originate off-shore? Why is there no clear statement that simply states that all clients need to register and need to ensure that telemarketing performed on their behalf conforms to these rules?

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CRTC, telemarketing