Late yesterday afternoon, TELUS filed its first applications for forbearance: for Edmonton, Alberta and Vancouver, West Vancouver, North Vancouver, Richmond, New Westminster, Newton and Whalley, British Columbia.

Among the most immediately significant aspects of last week’s Cabinet announcement was the removal of restrictions on winbacks and promotions.

Winback rules were introduced by the CRTC to prevent the incumbent telephone companies from targeting new customers of competitors with special offers, which presumably would threaten emerging competition. Given the current state of competition, the government was of the view that the CRTC’s winback restrictions were no longer required.

Want to get your phone company’s attention? Just like trying to cancel your cell phone service, the mere threat of leaving may bring the best deals.

Let the games begin.

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Update: [April 12, 1:20 pm]
Bell Canada has now filed applications for Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa-Gatineau, London, Hamilton and Quebec City.

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winback, CRTC, local forbearance, TELUS

Working in a carrier environment helps identify the challenges of business-grade requirements for service delivery. While the needs of the corporate world are somewhat irrelevant to some, for the sake of argument, accept that agencies and departments within the government might be among those corporate clients.

Let’s assume that there are some employees who want or need to work from a remote location, like home, or from vacation. I would suspect that there are a number of corporate applications that these people might need to access that might require priority treatment over the kids’ gaming or music – either in the same location or on the same router at the ISP. Maybe it is a videoconference link or even a secured enhanced IM link. Maybe a mobile health care kiosk.

How does the industry provide network quality assurance for these applications in a ‘neutral’ network?

Is there ever a situation that might permit discrimination – let’s actually call it differentiation – between the various bit streams? Is it unreasonable to permit ISPs and their clients the flexibility to develop creative business relationships which enable such services?

Let me lay on a more consumer-oriented example. I just upgraded to the latest version of Joost. The software warns people:

Joost is a streaming video application, and so uses a relatively high amount of bandwidth per hour. In 1 hour of viewing, 320 Mb will be downloaded and 105 Mb uploaded, which means that a 1 Gb cap will be exhausted in about 10 hours.

If you pay for your bandwidth usage per megabyte or have your usage capped by your ISP, you should be careful to always exit the Joost program completely when you are finished watching it.

What if pay-for-use pricing or usage caps become a constraint for Joost or another application like it? Would it be OK for the application developer to enter into advertising or other agreements that enable it to pay for excess usage on behalf of its clients? Think of it as being analogous to toll-free calling, where the charges are reversed.

Notably, Tim Wu describes net neutrality as a network design principle, rather than a rigid requirement.

The internet isn’t perfect but it aspires for neutrality in its original design. Its decentralized and mostly neutral nature may account for its success as an economic engine and a source of folk culture.

It is important to note his selection of terms such as ‘mostly neutral’ in recognition that the internet has not been bound by a fixed regulatory (or network design) framework. Is it possible that part of the internet’s success as an economic engine is the variability enabled by its original design – the inter-networking of the internet?

Can the existing undue discrimination provisions of Canada’s Telecom Act provide sufficient protection to permit the continued evolution of flexible internet business models?

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Joost, net neutrality, Tim Wu

Twenty five years ago, on the April 10, 1982 episode of Saturday Night Live, Eddie Murphy held up a live lobster and asked viewers to place calls to vote on whether to save or boil Larry the Lobster. The tally was 239,096 to release Larry and 227,452 for death by boiling water and drawn butter.

Larry was saved for a week – but that is another story.

The event was a high water mark for interactive TV at the time. Almost half a million calls were placed in a 30 minute period over AT&T;’s 900 network. Perhaps Murphy’s stunt could be considered an early demonstration of the potential for telecom and media convergence.

The telephone network survived and SNL proved the potential for interactive voting to profitably integrate with TV shows. Today’s voting for singing Idols should be thankful for the ultimate sacrifice made by a lobster in the name of market research.

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Larry the Lobster, Eddie Murphy, SNL

Rogers has acquired a number of TV stations that needed to be divested from CHUM/CTV Globemedia as a result of their merger.

It is interesting to see how Rogers is able to successfully operate a converged business model: with cable TV, wireless, internet, home phone, broadcasting, adding content from print media and sports franchises.

What are the factors that have enabled successful integration of various acquired properties? How does Rogers drive synergies beyond the value of these strategic investments?

Rogers Communications President and COO, Nadir Mohamed, will be the opening speaker at The 2007 Canadian Telecom Summit in June.

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Rogers, A-Channel, Nadir Mohamed

Over the past few years, there had been a trend toward extreme sports – people pushing the limits of human physical capacity and perhaps pushing the limits of common sense as people seek fame and glory.

There are extremist views that keep percolating from some elements in the discussion that threaten the nationalization of telecommunications infrastructure unless carriers embrace net neutrality. Whoa!

There is something about the threat of such expropriation of assets that makes you say ‘hmmm’. My experience is that the investment community doesn’t take kindly to doing business in countries that: a) nationalize infrastructure or private property; or, b) engage in extortion.

I would prefer to be able to simply ignore the extremist rants of some Canadian members of the Hugo Chavez fan club. They seem to be a loud minority, pining for simpler days of Ministries of Posts, Telephone and Telegraphs. Sorry – those days of central government planning and the associated glacial or geological pace of network evolution have been eradicated from most of the planet.

I’d prefer to discuss the issue of net neutrality on a level with some of the deeper thinking academics. There are serious questions to be addressed.

I’m even willing to acknowledge there are certain service provider misbehaviours that may warrant a modicum of contrition, consistent with my view that we generally have in place the necessary laws to safeguard reasonable rights.

Later in the week, I’ll look at some examples of why I think the objectives of net neutrality just aren’t realistic for customers who want advanced services.

The rapid pace of internet innovation we have witnessed to date has taken place without specialized net neutrality legislation. It seems to me that network neutrality is overly broad regulation that will serve stifle innovation.

The internet has proven itself to be a turbo-charged engine for economic growth in the information age. Network neutrality may result in shifting into neutral the enormous power of the internet in effectively moving information.

That is a risk that we can’t take idly.

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nationalization, Hugo Chavez, net neutrality