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.
Mark 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.
Stanford 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:
Network architecture
Heterogeneous applications
Heterogeneous physical layer technologies
Security
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?
AOL announced a location plug-in for its instant messaging service. Recently, The Economist ran a story “Go with the flow” about using mobile phone data to visualize how people are moving around.
It’s all about location. AOL is working from IP addresses and providing user specific information to display which friends are ‘Near Me’. The Economist story is about a scheme developed at MIT to take advantage of the near ubiquity of cell phones. MIT has also released its WiFi iFind software, another product of its Sensible Cities lab.
MIT has been testing its mobile phone tracking using anonymized data from Telecom Italia and Mobilkom Austria. Their results are said to take the form of luminous maps, with moving colour coded arrows, dots and patches that indicate the density and speed of people. The article suggests
with markets becoming saturated and mobile operators’ revenue-growth slowing… providing information about travel patterns could be a lucrative opportunity for telecoms firms
While some current traffic maps are based on aggregated vehicle GPS data, there is far more information that can be gathered from more person-based information. Pedestrian traffic to help value commercial real-estate; tourism information by tracking where roaming visitors go; traffic lights based on vehicle loads.
How would you use the information and tracking capabilities?
How do users ensure anonymity? Who owns my location data?
I’ll admit it. I like reading CRTC decisions. I find them informative and often even entertaining.
I know that makes me a little, well ummm, different?
A lawyer colleague of mine tells me that every law student learns about judgments by Lord Denning. I am told he had a beautiful writing style and the reader could immediate tell where his judgments were heading from the opening sentence.
Take a look at the opening of the dissenting opinion by Commissioner Barbara Cram, in the CRTC’s decision last week to reject the appeal by Barrett Xplore.
Once again I disagree with my colleagues in the majority on this issue and I reiterate my dissent from Telecom Decision CRTC 2006-9 in its entirety. I continue to believe that my concerns stated therein remain valid and unanswered. And upon having the ability to once again reflect on the majority decision, I have further concerns.
Any doubts about where she is heading on this? Agree or not (and I agree), her dissent is well written.
Why are there unanswered questions and concerns? As Commissioner Cram argues, is the CRTC the right agency to act as project manager for rural broadband?
