Now that Google has gained general consumer acceptance of context-based ads appearing when viewing email over the web, Pudding Media has announced advertising supported voice over IP (VoIP) phone calls that deliver ads related to the conversation in progress.

The company’s aim is to license its speech-recognition service to other companies that use VoIP.

I suspect that there are some significant privacy concerns.

Are we ready for machines to be eavesdropping on our calls? While one side of the conversation may have made a positive selection of the advertising supported conversation, how will the person on the other end of the call be notified that there is an electronic eavesdropper?

Don’t both parties need to agree that this is an acceptable technology to be applied?

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Puddingmedia, VoIP, privacy

>In July, the CRTC issued a decision to try to speed up the roll-out of broadband in rural regions, rather than wait for the conclusion of the entire proceeding.

In its Deferral Account decision from February 2006, the CRTC determined that incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) should use the majority of the funds in their deferral accounts to expand broadband services to rural and remote communities.

Last September, the ILECs submitted a list of 650 candidate communities and the CRTC matched this list to submissions from competitive broadband service providers to develop a list of presumedly uncontested, potentially unserved areas.

In a July 6 decision, still only part way through the deferral account proceeding, the CRTC figured that it might as well get a jump on things by letting the ILECs get going on the uncontested areas.

Barrett Xplore has called on the CRTC to review and vary this decision as having been based on errors in law and facts.

The CRTC didn’t wait for the proceeding to be complete before issuing its listing. The lists of three-year plans for serving communities are now up to a year old and merit review. The CRTC’s interim decision was never described in the original public notice and parties had not yet had an opportunity to comment on the evidence.

There are other questions that have been raised about whether subsidies should apply to business services in rural communities. Wouldn’t that be an interesting twist? Residential subscribers are being asked to subsidize business services. The CRTC’s interim July decision did not address this point, yet authorized the ILECs to get started.

In their comments filed with the Commission, Bell and TELUS had differing viewpoints. TELUS agreed that the CRTC’s process did not allow Barrett Xplore to update their list of communities, and supported Barrett’s request to remove two areas from the approval list. Of course, are there other areas that would have been updated by other alternate broadband suppliers. The clear message was that the process was flawed despite the CRTC’s altruistic intent.

In the end, the concern is the potential distortion to market forces, contrary to the policy direction that has been paramount for the Commission.

Will the deferral account spending plans create a windfall for ILECs to have a monopoly on rural broadband services, paid for by excess rates charged to urban residential subscribers? Or will the funds enable all competing service providers to have an equal shot at providing service – even in rural markets?

Earlier this week, Bill St. Arnaud circulated a piece that describes the newly released business case study on the fibre network built by the city of Burlington, Vermont.

The piece starts off with a quote by the project leader, Tim Nulty, who is described with powerful CV credentials as: Former Chief Economist, U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, Former Chief Economist, U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, Former World Bank Senior Project Manager, Former Telecommunications Entrepreneur in Eastern Europe, …

I’m very familiar with many government owned telecom operations throughout the world, over many years, and across many different forms of government, and I can tell you that governments generally do not subsidize publicly owned telecommunications. They milk telecommunications – these systems generate a lot of revenue.

My frustration in reading the business case is that the document then proceeds to describe a number of ways that taxpayers provide hidden subsidies to this project.

Of course, they aren’t called subsidies and the business case authors don’t seem to recognize these benefits as costs to tax payers, but let’s look at some examples.

The $2.6 million price tag for the first phase, a 16.5 mile fiber-optic system (144 strand single mode) was relatively low because Burlington owned the 2.5 miles of underground conduit and 33% of the poles needed for aerial cables.

In other words, the project received access to taxpayer owned infrastructure – a form of subsidy.

BT brought in Koch Financial Corp. to finance the network and lease it back to the City via a tax-exempt municipal capital lease

Tax-exempt? Meaning less taxes generated? Does that sound like a taxpayer provided subsidy?

Still – Burlington Telecom is an interesting case study for fibre to the home. Comments?

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Burlington Telecom, FTTH

Yesterday, I reported on Ted Rogers speech to the Canadian Club in Ottawa and I mentioned that there would be a response from Pierre Karl Péladeau of Quebecor today.

I have just returned from the lunch and here are some highlights from his speech.

To be fair, I will not add commentary – my views on the AWS spectrum auction can be found by reading postings on this site over the past year.

Here are some of the statements:

like you I have not had a chance to actually use an iPhone. It’s not available in Canada. 1 million have already been sold south of the border.

Americans can pay about $60 a month to use this iPhone. In Canada, this same phone will likely cost between $260 to $879 a month. In fact the National Post recently ran a story featuring a reknown expert in the field, who estimated it would cost $900 a month to use all the functions of the iPhone in Canada.

Some of the advocacy advertising was present, as the accompanying graphic shows, with a strangled Blackberry under the weight of chains.

Pierre Karl cited the statements from RIM’s Don Morrison from earlier in the year:

The COO of RIM believes that Canadian carriers could increase the number of BlackBerries they sell each week by eight or nine times if they simply lowered their prices to the levels seen in such countries as Germany, France and Spain. Eight or nine times the current sales volume!

The very symbol of the Canadian wireless success is being denied to Canadians. That’s a real shame but it does tell us something very concerning about the wireless industry in Canada, and that is the focus of my address today.

He spoke about free markets:

The Canadian market would be considered free if it were open to foreign ownership, but I am led to believe a truly open market is simply not in the cards politically right now. Too many issues come to play. So we find ourselves among Canadian providers, asking the federal government to set rules that best guarantee a higher level of wireless competition.

I may write something about these points later. In the meantime, I’ll let you judge for yourselves. The complete text is available on-line.

Technorati Tags:
Quebecor, AWS

University of Waterloo has created a Media and Mobility Network Project (MMNP), which is intended to explore and develop advanced communications solutions for students on campus.

The project’s genesis came from a recognition that a lot of the traditional phone and TV lines in the dorms were not being used as students migrated to mobile services and video downloading.

As the project definition describes, the concept has grown to become more multi-disciplinary:

The Project will dovetail with a Faculty of Arts initiative to apply research from the Humanities and Social Sciences into various means of content creation and information delivery to UW students, and to collaborate with business partners to create a business model for the digital delivery of information (news, commentary, advertising interactive content, and the like) in a post-newspaper age.

Waterloo has begun to play with some of the advanced technology and the university is seriously moving forward to change the nature of communications services being provided in the 2008-2009 school year.

Service providers should sit up and take notice.

I met with the MMNP team in early September and this group is serious about demonstrating progress. The project is especially exciting because of the diversity of the university organizations involved in shaping the project, including the types of representatives from the Faculty of Arts that can explore deeper communications issues I raised on Monday.

With the University of Waterloo’s profile among the people who are creating the next generation of technology and services, you can expect that there will be a number of folks who should be watching what is going on with Waterloo’s MMNP.