I have written frequently in the past about the strength of Israeli telecom technologies and there are a number of other sectors, including biotech, aquaculture and agricultural innovations that also have good synergies with Canada.

The weekend Globe and Mail has an article called Putting Stock in Israel by Avner Mandelman, founder of Giraffe Capital.

The article advocates looking at investing in Israel through ISL – the Israel exchange traded fund.

Israeli companies place second (behind Canada) in foreign representation on NASDAQ.

Look at his 10-point checklist for why it is a good time to buy.

Following up on yesterday’s posts [here and here] about the speed of high speed, I received word this past week that Rogers has increased the speeds on its internet services.

The core product, Express ($45), now delivers 7 Mbps, which is almost the same bit rate as Rogers Extreme (at 8 Mbps for $53). For serious gamers and movie downloading, Rogers Extreme Plus delivers 18 Mbps for $100.

The cable companies are keeping pressure on the telcos – when will we see fibre to the home in Canada?

California-based market intelligence firm, iSuppli, has issued a report that may suggest the realities of Canadian winters could stand in the way of telco upgrades to fibre to the home (FTTH) architectures.

FTTH now is a competitive threat to MSOs in a few regions where the cost of deployment is not prohibitive. These regions include Japan, where fiber can be aerial fed from the central office, i.e. using telephone lines or in this case fiber lines strung from telephone poles. Other regions include Verizon’s territories in the United States, which are more than 60 percent aerial fed—and in Paris, where the existing sewer systems provide a low-cost conduit for running fiber to buildings. For most other regions, the cost of deployment is very high.

FTTH deployments in these regions can be between 12 to 15 times the cost of deploying broadband over a telco’s copper plant. The cost factor will slow down the widespread, global deployment of FTTH—but will not stop it.

To what extent do our winter ice storms and consumer resistance to unsightly overhead wires contribute to Canada’s phone companies lagging Verizon and NTT in FTTH?

When will telcos here take the leap to all fibre access?

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iSuppli, Verizon, NTT, FTTH

The CRTC has released its annual report [ pdf] on the state of Canadian telecommunications.

In 2000, the government requested that the Commission report annually over a five-year period on the status of competition in the Canadian telecommunications industry. The CRTC decided to continue the annual report beyond the first 5 years in order to allow interested parties to stay informed about the state of the Canadian telecommunications industry.

Some of the quick highlights:

• Total telecommunications revenues increased by 4.5%, rising to $36.1 billion in 2006. Almost half of industry revenues now comes from cellular and internet services.
• Competitors captured 38% of total revenues, an increase of 3% from the previous year. Overall, the revenues of competitors increased by 12% to $13.7 billion, mainly due to the cable companies recording a 17% growth in revenues.
• The cellular telephone market remained the largest and fastest growing sector in the industry. Revenues grew by 15% to $12.7 billion in 2006. Cellular telephone revenues accounted for 35% of the total telecommunications revenues, up from 23% in 2005. Cellular telephones are now in more than two thirds of Canadian households.
• 60% of all households now have high-speed Internet access, up from 51% in 2005. Canada remained number one in the G8 with respect to broadband adoption.
• Capital expenditures rose by nearly 25% to $6.9 billion.

What does all this mean? The industry appears strong and is investing in the future. Consumers are continuing to sign up for mobile and broadband services and they are buying value added applications as well.

I’m sure I will be writing more as I go through the report.

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CRTC