I was recently pointed to a speech last month by New York governor Eliot Spitzer to the New York State Farm Bureau Annual Meeting in Niagara Falls, where he launched a campaign for universal broadband service for all of NY.

When many of us think of NY, we think of one of the most densely populated parts of the planet. We think of advanced communications driving Wall Street, forgetting that there is a lot of territory upstate.

A drive from Buffalo to Albany can look similar to driving from Toronto to Sudbury – albeit with way fewer Tim Horton’s locations and no Canadian Tire stores.

Governor Spitzer said that his state has inadequate infrastructure for the Information Age.

In fact, fewer than 25 percent of New Yorkers in rural areas have access to broadband Internet. Some may assume that because these areas are rural, they have natural and unavoidable disadvantages. But a rural landscape has not stopped Canada, a mostly rural country, from maintaining a broadband penetration rate of over 50 percent.

This problem does not only affect Upstate. Downstate doesn’t fare much better. Nearly two-thirds of people living in New York City lack access to affordable, high-speed broadband.

He blames the US federal government for a lack of leadership – the absence of a national broadband strategy.

So the governor has set his own objectives:

Our goals are—by the year 2015—for every citizen of New York to have access to at least 20 megabits per second in each direction, and 100 megabits per second in major metropolitan areas.

Despite Canada being cited as ahead of New York, will broadband be an issue in Canadian politics? How will we ensure that in 2015, Canada will still be seen as a leader by our neighbours?

Technorati Tags:
Eliot Spitzer, broadband

Apparently, some people with Rogers.com email addresses are not getting their mail. There has been a server outage since last night which results in mail getting bounced back to the sender.

Unfortunately, the mail isn’t getting queued for later delivery, which is the normal situation.

Instead, senders are receiving:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

username@rogers.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 16): 554 delivery error: dd This user doesn’t have a rogers.com account (username@rogers.com)

This is actually a serious problem. When bounce-backs like this are received, this kind of message results in people being dropped from subscriptions to any newsletters that they subscribe to.

I was told about this by a Rogers customer who called technical support and reached Jason, who knew about the trouble and said there was nothing he could about it. When the customer suggested that he should at least put an announcement about the trouble onto the ‘on-hold’ message, so that people don’t have to wait listening to music for 11 minutes, he said that he couldn’t do that.

The customer asked him to have his manager look into it. Jason said that he doesn’t have a manager.

Attention Rogers: you have someone answering your technical support lines who has no manager. Sounds like a coup took place without notifying the stock markets.

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Rogers, email

In the Policy Direction issued to the CRTC in December 2006, the Commission was told that when regulating on a non-economic basis, to the greatest extent possible to use measures that are symmetric and competitively neutral.

Last July, the CRTC set out an action plan to comply with the Policy Direction. At that time, the Commission said that certain social regulatory measures, such as privacy safeguards, quality of service standards and rebates plan and a Consumer Bill of Rights would be prioritized following the establishment of the telecommunications consumer agency.

Well, the CCTS now exists and that means it is show-time for the CRTC to review its social and other non-economic regulatory measures for compliance with the Policy Direction.

Public Notice 2008-1 sets out the timetable for this review, with paper being exchanged through the month of February and an action plan to be developed and issued by the CRTC before the end of April. The objective of the exercise seems to be to determine which measures will be reviewed in 2008/2009 versus getting pushed out by a year to 2009/2010.

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CRTC, social regulation, Policy Direction

AT&T; (NYSE: T) has announced that it will be providing free access to its 10,000 hot spots for subscribers to its residential broadband service.

Why would it do this?

In part, this move will drive an increased share of the residential broadband market, especially among households that have acquired one of AT&T;’s exclusive iPhones.

AT&T; is leveraging parts of the company that are performing well – mobile wireless – together with its WiFi assets in order to help with its battle against those pesky cable companies.

A side benefit is that mobile users may off-load some of their most traffic intensive applications away from the mobile network and onto the WiFi hotspots. It will result in a better user experience and lower capital cost structure.

Increased customer counts; increased revenues; happier customers; lower costs. Call it better bundling.

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ATT, WiFi

Last month, I asked if we were witnessing the beginning of the end of utility based telcos when various media outlets began to report that Ottawa’s electric utility is selling Telecom Ottawa. At the time, I asked if Ottawa Hydro’s desire to focus on its core business was going to be something to watch in other jurisdictions?

Now, there is a news release from Toronto Hydro that it is seeking expressions of interest with respect to a possible sale of Toronto Hydro Telecom.

Again, I ask:

• Who will be the most likely bidders?
• To what extent would utelcos operate differently in major centres versus those markets with fewer competitive alternatives?

How should municipalities exercise political strategies through ownership of infrastructure versus strategic purchasing of services from private sector service providers?