Like many small businesses, the president of is also the director of IT, the procurement manager, finance and accounting, sales and (most importantly) the catering manager.

As director of IT, I developed a backup and recovery strategy to keep off-site backups of current projects and do a full backup periodically to CDs, also kept in another location. Like many businesses, performing backups seems to rank slightly ahead of going to the dentist in the list of My Favourite Things.

But recent telecom outages and watching friends and family go through the pain of crashed computers and iPods have recently made me rearrange my priorities; much the same as the need for a root canal may finally get you to start flossing, or the way people get a home security system after their neighbour’s home gets broken into.

Some ISPs offer automated services – but many of them are size dependent. I have 32GB of material that I want backed up. One of the Canadian telcos charges $6 per month for the first 3GB and $4 for the next block of 3GB – that gets to be pretty pricey. On the other hand, I have now started using a service called Carbonite, that offiers unlimited backup storage capabilities for an annual fee of $50 (US).

The service operates in the background and as the Red Herring review says, it really is idiot-proof. Once installed, Carbonite appears as any other drive on the My Computer view. Carbonite’s default settings take care of backing up My Documents and the Desktop, but it is simple to add other files and folders. Files that are waiting to be backed up have a yellow flag; backed up files are tagged green. It took about a week for it to do the initial 32GB back-up, but it is handling day-to-day changes with ease.

This is a winner for personal and small businesses. Take a free Test drive by clicking on the link.

The question I have is why all ISPs don’t offer these kinds of solutions.

Technorati Tags:
Carbonite, backup, recovery, SME

A challenge! Pistols at dawn. Mark Evans asked what I thought about Videotron CEO Robert Depatie’s comments yesterday in respect of a transmission tariff. It has been a while since I got dragged into Net Neutrality, so let’s go, Mr. Evans. I’ll meet you in the alley…

To start with, I don’t believe the press has accurately reported what was said. The Globe and Mail said

Videotron boss Robert Depatie wants the federal government to slap a transmission tariff on providers — like the music and film industry — so they can shoulder part of the burden.

That isn’t what he said, according to the speech I received. He didn’t ask the feds to step in. The Globe’s account would seem to fly in the face of his concurrent press release that called for cable deregulation and his “vibrant plea for free competition.” M. Depatie said:

What is missing in this model is a way for the provider of content to share part of the content revenue stream for the use of the network. If the movie studio, say, were to mail a DVD – not a untypical scenario – they would expect to pay postage or courier fees – why should they not expect a transmission tariff.

He also spoke from his past business experience.

Before I worked at Videotron, I was in the food business – we were a ‘content producer’ in the parlance of today’s communications business. To reach our customers, we dealt with a distribution channel, in our case, grocery stores.

To reach our customers we needed to convince our distribution channels to place our product in advantageous positions (end of aisles, eye-to-shoulder height on shelves – too high, or too low and sales suffered), and to help promote our product. We paid for that service. We compensated the distributor for his ‘help’ in making our product more successful.

Not all producers pay stores for product placement. And I have noticed that my neighbourhood grocery stores and drug stores give preferred placement to their house brands. But I don’t see people shouting about food neutrality. There is no ‘Save the soft drinks’ movement. Although with winter approaching I would like to find Red River cereal more prominently displayed, I shop around until I find it. I’m not calling for a federal inquiry as to why Sugar Zombies are easier to find at every store.

There is limited shelf space next to the cash registers or at the end of each aisle. How do you think the decisions get made as to which products get displayed there?

If we are OK with Sympatico presenting MSN more prominently and Rogers presenting Yahoo because those companies struck appropriate business relationships, what is wrong with a movie distributor doing a deal in order to be able to deliver the goods over a faster pipe to its customers? I don’t see him talking about blocking the other movie distributors.

Instead of movies, let’s say that your business wants you to work at home. But they are concerned because at 3:30 each day, your neighbour’s kid comes home and starts downloading all the TV shows and music his friends were talking about in school. So your connectivity gets spotty. Should you be able to subscribe to ‘Bandwidth Plus’ – a service that prioritizes your connection so you can keep working and getting paid?

Now, if you can subscribe to that Bandwidth Plus service, is there any reason why your office can’t subscribe to that service for all of its telecommuting employees?

What if my internet brokerage wanted to buy the same service for me to make sure that I could trade my telecom stocks the second that I hear about another flip-flop on income trust rules? Shouldn’t they be able to offer their best customers a way to make sure our trades get through?

Why is it any different for any other form of content?

We all want broadband providers to increase the size of the pipes coming into our homes. We want them to take on the multi-billion dollar risks associated with making that possible, trying to sort out how to recover the cost.

A business model that seeks to find ways to keep my monthly bill down to a manageable amount is just fine with me.

Technorati Tags:
Videotron, Mark Evans, Net Neutrality, Mark Goldberg

Last week, the CRTC provided a summary of market statistics for residential service. Yesterday, the CRTC released similar figures for business services. The data shows industry-wide figures for year-end 2004, 2005 and the first 8 months of 2006. Both sets of data were released as part of Public Notice 2006-12, the process to review the Local Forbearance.

For business services, the rate of ILEC losses has slowed, but perhapos the most interesting statistic is that the number of industry-wide business lines has fallen 0.5% in the first 8 months of 2006, as contrasted with 2% growth when looking at 2005 versus 2004. Where did the lines go?

As observed with the residential market, business service revenues are remaining relatively constant in 2004 and 2005 at about $3.0B. If anything, revenues appear to be increasing moderately.

Category	31 December 2004	31 December 2005	31 August 2006
ILEC NAS	5,216,005	5,163,714	5,080,403
non-ILEC NAS	705,569	884,123	935,276
Total Market	5,921,574	6,047,837	6,015,679
industry revenues ($M$)	$3,084	$3,188	$2,182

Technorati Tags:
CRTC, local forbearance, Mark Goldberg

The Telecom Act requires that regulated rates be just and reasonable. These terms go back more than a century to the days when telecommunications was regulated under the Railway Act. What do you do when you believe that some decisions made by the CRTC are neither just nor reasonable?

You ask them to take another look.

Telus has filed a review and vary application, asking the CRTC to have a fresh look at the retroactive adjustment of rates for interconnection that were set out in Decisions 2006-22, 2006-23 and 2006-42.

The Decisions were issued in April and June of 2006, but apply to rates charged to competitors in the period as far back as 2000.

Many of these competitors don’t exist any more. Others have gone through corporate changes, like Call-Net being acquired by Rogers, Allstream (it was called AT&T; Canada at the time of the original filing) linking with MTS and GT hooking up with Bell. The fiscal books for the period in question have been closed and audited by all of the companies long, long ago.

Further, TELUS claims that after all this time, the CRTC got the rates wrong in any case. After all that time, the CRTC ignored TELUS-specific cost information and imposed the costs that were submitted by other ILECs.

This one will be interesting to watch.

Technorati Tags:
TELUS, CRTC