How to build smarter cities

May 4, 2022

TorontoEarlier this week, Toronto signed an agreement with San Francisco, pledging greater integration of their digital media industries, an advanced high-speed network to link the locations, and joint educational and collaboration programs. Shane Schick’s perspectives can be found here.

A Globe and Mail story quotes Joaquin Alvarado, director of the Institute for Next Generation Internet at San Francisco State University, leader of the Digital City Network initiative:

You’ve got to make it easy for people to be connected

I agree. But that approach runs contrary to that which has traditionally been followed by Canadian cities.

For years, Toronto has joined the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) in fighting carriers seeking to deploy fibre on municipal rights of way. With the city of Toronto’s backing, for years FCM has been in front of the CRTC and the courts as cities sought to tax carriers a substantial percentage of their revenues, not on the basis of cost recovery.

How will Toronto approach this Digital City Network project?

According to the story:

There is no financial element to the arrangement. Instead, the local government’s role is limited to building partnerships and supporting industry. But at some point the city itself could be investing to expand networks, Mr. Miller said.

There is no need to spend taxpayer dollars on city-owned telecom networks. The city would be better off with a declaration that it will no longer fight carriers looking to invest and it will get out of the way of service providers that want to improve fibre access to their customers. The best way to support industry may be for the city to just get out of the way.

FCC launches net neutrality inquiry

March 22, 2007
FCCThe FCC has launched an inquiry into net neutrality, although the language they used was an inquiry “into broadband market practices.”

The FCC’s press release invites comments on:

  • How broadband providers are managing Internet traffic on their networks today
  • Whether providers charge different prices for different speeds or capacities of
    service
  • Whether our policies should distinguish between content providers that charge
    end users for access to content and those that do not
  • How consumers are affected by these practices

The Notice of Inquiry further seeks comment on whether the Policy Statement should incorporate a new principle of nondiscrimination and, if so, how would “nondiscrimination” be defined, and how would such a principle read.

The Chair, Kevin Martin added:

We have the dual responsibilities of creating an environment that promotes infrastructure investment and broadband deployment and to ensure that consumers’ access to content on the Internet is protected. We can best fulfill these responsibilities by being fully informed.

The Notice of Inquiry process is being criticized by two of the Commissioners (Adelstein and Copps) as being too lengthy. They would have preferred a procedure such as NPRM, that sets out a proposed rule making for comment by all parties. The majority echo the sentiments of the Chair.

As such, it appears to me that this process is to assert FCC control of the debate. Some advocates of net neutrality have begun to cast the issue in terms of ‘truth in advertising’ – perhaps to move the debate under the Federal Trade Commission. Their position is that non-neutral networks may be permitted, but cannot be sold as ‘the internet.’

Earlier this week, the UK regulator, Ofcom indicated that it believes that there are sufficient anti-discrimination provisions to deal with net neutrality concerns already existing within the EU regulatory framework.

We’ll keep on eye on this file.

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Wavelengths wanted

January 25, 2017

CANARIE has issued an RFP to ensure continued availability of CAnet 4 and its successor network beyond the current mandate. As mentioned previously, the Federal budget proposes $120M in funding for CANARIE.

While the current architecture is designed to provide researchers with a national backbone and certain global connections, it will be interesting to see if CANARIE (or others) will develop a mandate to lead Canada’s participation in research to examine architectural frameworks for internet evolution.

Wireless pricing heats up

January 25, 2017

TELUSMark Evans’ post yesterday had me humming ‘Moving on up’ all morning. You’ll have to read his post to understand why.

I’m going to disagree with one of the points he led with:

In Canada, the major wireless carriers don’t compete on price

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’d like to see even lower prices, but I don’t buy the statement that there isn’t price competition.

Rate plans and even system access fees are quite different between the carriers and service providers. Some say that the marketplace can be quite confusing because of the variety of plans. Let’s look at some of the most recent activity – still in the wake of the introduction of WNP.

I’ll start with TELUS because, of the big three, TELUS is the one carrier actively promoting portability in their print, TV and internet ads. TELUS has a ‘Double your minutes‘ plan available right now, which cuts prices per peak minute in half. Bell has a promotion that allows people to bundle unlimited local calling to other Bell phones. Rogers has its variations on that theme, including long distance to Rogers phones among other specials. Virgin is running a buy one month, get one free promotion to go with their usual no contract plans.

Each service provider has a variety of plans that offer customers a myriad of options to optimize their costs.

Buying wireless service isn’t as simple as looking at a price per minute posted at your local wireless kiosk. It isn’t as though we are buying a litre of gasoline. Mind you, the Canadian gasoline industry hasn’t done much better convincing average Canadians that their market is fiercely competitive, so I’m not crazy about the benefits of a single price per minute boldly advertised in storefronts. And I sure don’t want to see regulations to require that kind of signage.

I like to think that the availability of all these rate plans is a good thing. Let people pick between family plans, student plans, corporate affinity plans, etc. Choice is a good thing. Let me decide whether I want to lock-in for a few years in exchange for a discounted phone? Or maybe I want the flexibility to pay as I go while I have visiting relatives for the summer. Shop around. There is a difference and you may have to work to find the best fit for your own circumstances.

Aren’t those signs of price competition?

Stanford’s clean slate for the internet

March 21, 2007
StanfordStanford University is hosting a seminar today looking at how the internet should look in 15 years.

As Nick McKeown, the project head, says in a School of Engineering news release:

We should be able to answer that question by saying we created exactly what we need, not just that we patched some more holes, made some new tweaks or came up with some more work-arounds. Let’s invent the car instead of giving the same horse better hay.

The group issued a whitepaper last year that described the launch of the inter-disciplinary program with 5 key areas of research:

  1. Network architecture
  2. Heterogeneous applications
  3. Heterogeneous physical layer technologies
  4. Security
  5. Economics & policy

The introduction to the whitepaper had fascinating language about shortcomings of the current operation of the internet:

… we don’t believe that we can or should continue to rely on a network that is often broken, frequently disconnected, unpredictable in its behaviour, rampant with (and unprotected from) malicious users, and probably not economically sustainable.

We will want to watch for news from today’s presentations.

The new federal budget calls for $120M to fund CANARIE, including the development of CA*net5.

Who will lead Canada’s participation in examining a clean slate for the internet?

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