Last Friday, the CRTC must have been caught up in the holiday spirit unleashed by all of those post-Thanksgiving sales south of the border. All those ads for “buy one, get one free” just don’t seem to be as prevalent here.

As of last week, a regulatory constraint for deals on telecom services has been lifted. The Commission released a Decision that removed the need for ILECs to get approval for what could be considered any reasonable bundle of services.

In essence,

the bundling rules, including the requirement to file and obtain Commission approval for a tariff, no longer apply with respect to bundles in which the retail price at least equals the sum of the rates of all retail tariffed services included in the bundle.

So, a bundle can include one or more components that are still regulated, and as long as the price for the bundle is at least as high as the tariff price, no CRTC approval is required.

What could this mean for consumers? In areas that still have price regulation for local service, watch for deals that throw in a little internet here and there. Maybe a side order of discounted wireless, as long as you keep your basic residential service.

The relaxation of the bundling rules could mean even more for business users. Telcos have had a more difficult time responding in a timely fashion to special requirements set out in RFPs because many such arrangements needed regulatory approval.

The relaxation of the bundling rules could mean that pricing for business services will be getting more competitive.

Technorati Tags:
bundles, ILEC, CRTC

I mentioned that I saw Dave Caputo last week at the Scotia Capital investor event.

When we spoke, Dave reminded me that Sandvine wrote a white paper nearly 3 years ago – long before many of us had even heard the term Net Neutrality, let alone formed an opinion about it.

The white paper provides a different perspective on the term, suggesting that carrier management of traffic ensures true network neutrality by means of fair allocation of limited network resources between potentially competing uses of the network. The paper speaks of the Tragedy of the Commons.

When too many owners are endowed with the privilege to use a given resource, the resource is prone to overuse and eventual depletion or destruction.

Individual subscribers are concerned about maximizing their own personal utility of the broadband service. There is no incentive for the subscriber to moderate their use of the network without some form of feedback via the service plan definition, cost, structure and enforcement.

Of course, Sandvine provides tools to network operators that provide visibility into the traffic, enabling them to control the allocation of ‘common’ resources between subscribers, applications, and content providers. The objective is to maximize the utility of the network.

The editor for The Toronto Star’s Entertainment page must have taken the day off yesterday to have let parts of Raju Mudhar’s whine get through.

Here is the essence of the article. Pity us poor Canadians. We don’t have iPhone. No Amazon Kindle. TV streaming from ABC and CBS gets blocked. The article didn’t mention that we are also denied access to the really good Super Bowl commercials. That would have been my gripe.

Go ahead, rant, wring your hands, whine, beat your chest. But try to get the story straight.

Try to follow this quote – which is actually talking about Amazon Kindle, a device that lets Amazon download a book to you electronically – and Amazon eats the cellular data charges.

Amazon is using Sprint’s EVDO network, which is similar to the Bell and Telus networks. But compared to the U.S., Canadian cellphone data access rate costs are quite high (travellers are telling horror stories about accidentally racking up bills in the hundreds of dollars for using their iPhones in Europe) and these new content/carrier relationships will require new thinking from Canadian cell companies.

Where do I start?

Gee – I guess the Entertainment page didn’t get the press release about Bell’s $7 per month all you can eat data plan. Sure, it is device specific – but so is the Kindle. Can Canadian carriers tailor data plans? Yes.

Now, let’s move onto the non sequitur about the iPhone. What do travellers racking up bills in the hundreds of dollars in Europe have to do with Canadian cellphone data rates? Yes, those same users would likely have racked up high rates in Canada as well – but, at the end of the day, those are roaming charges from AT&T.;

I have to remember. It’s just Sunday reading. And it’s supposed to be entertainment.

Technorati Tags:
Toronto Star, iPhone, Amazon Kindle

Much has been written about the impact of the rise of the dollar on Canada’s manufacturing heartland in Ontario. However, jobs that may be the most globally mobile – software development and high tech – are equally at risk because their labour costs have also risen. Canadian companies that have traditionally sold their goods priced in US dollars are doubly impacted – lower revenues getting recognized and higher costs.

And the response of the Ontario government? In its zeal to win votes in the last election, Ontario added an across the board 0.5% increase in labour costs to all employers.

How? By giving workers an extra statutory holiday in February. An extra paid day off. Yippie, if you are an employee. Not quite as gleeful if you are the employer.

In proclaiming the day, the premier said:

There is nothing more valuable to families than time together. And yet it seems tougher than ever to find, with so many of us living such busy lives. …

I can think of no better way for our government to get to work than by rewarding Ontarians for all their hard work, and for their belief that when we work together, build together and dream together, there is nothing we cannot accomplish.

The premier boasts to some that Ontario’s economy added 165,000 jobs in the past year. Derek DeCloet’s recent column in the Globe complains that more than half of these were in the public sector.

The smart way to spend money is to ensure the entire budget gets aligned with an innovation strategy. The Ontario Corporate Chief Technology Officer is hosting a Town Hall on Monday. Among other topics will be an examination of Government 2.0: How new technologies can transform and enhance Government. I hope to have a report on the session early next week.

If governments don’t spend strategically, we might find that employers use the new holiday in February to find ways to relocate jobs (without the families) to more cost competitive jurisdictions.

Technorati Tags:
competitiveness

The Canadian High Commission in London has again built a website to help coordinate the Canadian presence at the 2008 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February. The 2007 event attracted more than 50,000 people.

The folks at International Trade have released a new brochure to attract investment in Canada from wireless and multimedia companies: Canada as an investment destination for wireless and multimedia.

The report includes a few charts that demonstrate the competitiveness of Canadian labour rates for high tech workers. One of the charts compares management engineer salaries in Canada ($95K) versus Hong Kong ($97K), Denmark ($112K) and the US ($99). Of course, these were 2005 figures. Another chart compares the cost of software and multimedia talent in Waterloo, Ottawa, Montréal, Vancouver, San Diego, Dallas and New York.

What has the rise in the dollar done to Canadian competitiveness in these new economy jobs?

There are other factors as well. As Terence Corcoran recently wrote in his Invasion of the Policy Snatchers,

Maybe the objective [of the Competition Review Panel] is simply to stimulate debate to ultimately get to a “policy framework” that would tear down barriers that currently prevent Canadian entrepreneurs from competing successfully on the world market. If that’s the case, such things as high taxes, internal trade barriers, pro-union labour laws, statist health care, problems with education and training, infrastructure inadequacies and regulatory burden would be things to look at.

I’ll have some more thoughts tomorrow about the government using strategic spending as a means to drive an innovation agenda.

Technorati Tags:
competitiveness