As frequent readers will know, I have been a supporter of the annual STAC Conference, the annual gathering of the Structure, Tower and Antenna Council, bringing together the people who physically construct Canada’s telecommunications networks.

The 2023 conference is taking place in Niagara Falls, Tuesday, March 28, and Wednesday, March 29.

While the event is still nearly 8 months away, the organizers are already starting to pull together the event program. To that end, there is an open call for speaker proposals, with a deadline of October 10 – just 2 months from now.

Session content should not be promotional in nature and should remain unbiased with respect to any mention of manufacturers and products.

The following criteria will be used by STAC 2023 conference planners and the STAC Steering Committee when reviewing speaker proposals:

• Relevance to the conference program themes and objectives
• Innovation and fresh insights
• Knowledge and expertise of the speaker
• Research-based content where appropriate or relevant
• Learning outcomes/audience engagement
• Previous speaking experience
• Diversity of speaker background, experiences, perspectives, and ideas

I have reviewed a number of sessions from the past 2 years; you can get an idea of the kinds of sessions by searching with a keyword “STAC”.

Submit your speaking proposal by October 10. And mark the dates in your calendar: STAC2023 | March 28 -29 | Niagara Falls.

Enough is enough. Once again, we experienced another case of Canadian police forces’ use of the national public alert system.

At 5:58pm Tuesday evening, I received another useless Amber Alert on my phone.

As described by the AlertReady website, some government issuer (in this instance, the Ontario Provincial Police), crafted a message to tell the public that an 11-year old girl was last seen in Stratford and we are to dial 911 or go to amberalert.opp.ca.

More than 6 hours earlier, Stratford Police tweeted far more descriptive information: “last seen around the Rotary Complex. 5′ tall, thin build, black top with Jurassic Park logo, black shorts, black shoes, glasses.”

Why did the Amber Alert message contain so little descriptive information, when clearly, so much more useful information was available?

Thankfully, Stratford Police issued a tweet at 6:26 pm identifying that the girl had been found, safe, apparently in York Region, around 100 miles away.

That explains why the OPP website from the Amber Alert was displaying a banner with “NO ACTIVE ALERTS” when I visited the site around 7:00pm. As I write this, the OPP has not yet cancelled the Amber Alert.

There are clear responsibilities for the issuer of a public alert:

1. Specifies the type of alert [e.g. amber alert, tornado, etc.] as well as whether it is to be broadcast immediately because of imminent threat to life.
2. Chooses the content of the message, including which language(s) the message will be issued in.
3. Chooses the format of the message, including whether the message will be sent as text only, audio only or in both text and audio formats.
4. Specifies why and when the alert is sent.
5. Ensures that the alert is updated and/or cancelled.
6. Specifies the geographical areas covered by the alert.

That York Regional Police were involved in the rescue demonstrates the value of casting a wide net for the geographical coverage of the alert, but we should not accept the lengthy delay between the local police force’s appeal to the public over social media and the OPP issuing an official alert. Above all, the lack of useful descriptive information in the Amber Alert is inexcusable.

For more than 3 years, I have been calling for “formal process to review each use of the National Public Alert System, to help develop best practices”

The AlertReady system is a powerful tool in the hands of Canada’s public safety officials. As I have written before, I don’t question that the system was deployed in this instance. Shouldn’t we continually be examining how the system was deployed, to ensure that it will always be used in the best possible manner?

In April, I described a review of the US system being undertaken by the FCC. I would prefer to see leadership of such a review by Public Safety officials, but it is clear that multiple agencies and multiple levels of government should take interest.

As I have said repeatedly, shouldn’t we continually be examining how the NPAS system is being deployed, to ensure that it will always be used in the best possible manner?

With continued failures in the way imminent threats are being communicated to the public, the safety of Canadians is being threatened.

Ottawa needs to take action to improve the way alerts are being transmitted.

Last week, two acquisitions in the Canadian telecom sector were met by very different reactions.

The first was Quebecor’s purchase of VMedia, a wholesale-based internet service provider with bundled TV offerings. As described by the Toronto Star, “The deal is part of Quebecor’s push to expand outside its home province”.

The other was Beanfield’s acquisition of Vancouver-Based Urbanfibre. Beanfield operates what it calls the largest independent fibre-optic network in Toronto and Montreal; Urbanfibre is a similar company operating in Vancouver.

About its acquisition of VMedia, Quebecor told the Toronto Star, “VMedia is now one of the key partners that will help accelerate Quebecor’s plan to create greater competition in Canada through advantageous bundles of services, giving Canadian consumers more choices at better prices.” The deal drew a mixed reaction from other internet service providers. According to the Star, the Competitive Network Operators of Canada (CNOC) called the VMedia deal an “exciting possibility” for competition. On the other hand, Teksavvy characterized the deal as “another blow to the market and consumer choice”, referencing Bell’s acquisition of EBOX earlier this year.

Of course, these deals don’t reduce consumer choice. None of the deals could be termed as a ‘fire-sale’ with desperate ownership. In each case, the combined entities will be better funded, and better positioned to offer an expanded array of choices to consumers across a wider geography. As VMedia’s co-founder told the Star “We’re going to be able to provide even better deals for consumers and be even more competitive than the ISP space has been. I think that’s going to bode very well for consumers.”

Economist David Stinson recently wrote:

There are two issues which, in telecom markets, are all too often conflated — i) the number of retail market competitors, and ii) the scope of competition. By “scope of competition”, I mean the proportion of network and service components that are subject to competitive market forces.

In telecom markets, which necessarily involve substantial economies of scale and scope and significant proportions of costs which are insensitive either to traffic or the number of customers or both, the number of socially optimal and sustainable facilities-based providers will be far less than a superficial, Econ-101-based notion of perfect competition would imply.

Consolidation in telecom does not necessarily result in a reduction in competition for consumers. In each of last week’s transactions, consumers will still have access to competitive choice, with a stronger, more sustainable service provider complete with stronger financial capacity to invest.

These acquisitions result in a more competitive marketplace.

That’s good for consumers.

We are a little past the mid-point of the year and this is already the 81st blog post of 2022.

I thought it might be worth a little pause to see which posts have resonated the most so far this year.

1. Canada ranks 9th for quality, availability & cost of internet, May 30, 2022
2. Truthiness and Canada’s telecom industry, March 1, 2022
3. Canada’s 5G future, January 6, 2022
4. 5G and Canada’s digital economy, January 27, 2022
5. Combining LEO and 5G for rural broadband, May 31, 2022
6. Wireless prices falling, February 7, 2022
7. #ConnectTO: an ill-informed, misguided approach, March 29, 2022
8. A Kobayashi Maru scenario, April 20, 2022
9. 4 nearly national mobile competitors, June 20, 2022
10. Sustainable competition, May 11, 2022

All of the mid-year top-10 posts were actually written in 2022; none are carry-overs from 2021. That means there seems to be active interest in the current topics, compared to archival postings. That is somewhat understandable given the pace of updates on the site (driven in part by the level of activity in policy issues in the telecom sector so far this year).

It is interesting that 5G blog posts were 3 of the top 5 posts by viewership so far in 2022. I think it is also interesting that a post from just 2 months ago is in the top position.

My personal favourites from the list are are Truthiness and Canada’s telecom industry and #ConnectTO: an ill-informed, misguided approach.

Which of these have you forwarded to a friend or colleague?

How concentrated is Canada’s communications market? I guess the answer depends on answering “compared to what”?

If we want to examine how concentrated Canada’s market is compared to other countries, there is a reasonable way to measure that, known as the Hirschman-Herfindahl Index (HHI). To calculate a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, take the percentage market share of each firm in a sector (measured as a whole number), square that number, and then add all of those squares together. You end up with a number between 1 and 10,000.

If there is one player in the market, with 100% share, the HHI is 100×100 = 10,000. If there are 3 players with say, 40%, 30% and 30% share respectively, then the HHI is calculated as 40² + 30² + 30² = 1600 + 900 + 900 = 3400

As described by the Economist Intelligence Unit, HHI views the concentration of global telecom markets as:

• HHI < 3,000 “unconcentrated”;
• HHI 3,000-4,000 “moderately concentrated”;
• HHI > 4,000 “highly concentrated”

So, let’s look at the question from that perspective. Compared to our peers, how concentrated is Canada’s telecom market? Here is what the Economist Inclusive Internet Index is reporting:

As can be seen in this table, Canada’s wireless and wireline communications markets are less concentrated than our international peers. Indeed, of the 100 countries examined this year, the Economist Inclusive Internet Index ranked Canada’s Broadband market as the least concentrated and ranked the Wireless market concentration as the 90th of 100.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, a review of the world’s LTE deployments shows that there are 10 LTE networks operating in Canada compared to 9 in the US, 3 or 4 in most European countries (Russia has 9; Sweden has 6; Denmark has 5).

These are important factors when considering network diversity for overall resilience of Canada’s communications infrastructure.