As a member of the Nominations Committee, I was pleased to see Canada’s Telecom Hall of Fame release its list of Laureates for 2006. This year’s award dinner will honour 6 individuals who made significant contributions to the telecommunications industry in Canada.

A special award will recognize Nortel’s Digital World initiative from the 1970’s – a program that gave Canada a two-year head-start in digital switching technology and revolutionized telecommunications around the globe.

The individual Laureates are:

• Edward S. “Ted” Rogers (CEO, Rogers Communications Inc.),
• Edward S. Rogers, Sr. (Communications Inventor),
• Donald L. Hings (Inventor of the Walkie Talkie),
• Leila Wightman (Rural Telephone Pioneer),
• Francis Dagger (Public Ownership Advocate for the Prairies), and
• Ernest E. “Ernie” Saunders (Bell Canada)

There are many more worthy individuals and institutions that have been considered and continue to be considered for recognition in the future.

An objective of the Telecom Hall of Fame is

to foster a greater national awareness and appreciation among all Canadians of the outstanding global reputation our country enjoys as a historic leader and innovator in the field of telecommunications.

I’d like to think that among the educational benefits of the Telecom Hall of Fame is to inspire youth to contribute to Canada’s future leadership and innovation in the field.

We need to ensure that the Telecom Hall of Fame isn’t a museum that simply celebrates the greatness of the past.

Over the next few weeks, I’m participating in a number of meetings that promise to examine policies to accelerate Canada’s telecommunications leadership in the future. Stay tuned.

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Telecom Hall of Fame, Mark Goldberg

The CRTC’s accelerated process for reassessing the conditions for regulatory forbearance in the local market is proceeding, but it appears that not everyone feels the same sense of urgency to file on time.

Responses were due on Friday for the interrogatories that were posed by the CRTC associated with the original Public Notice.

Most of the information that was filed by parties had claims for confidentiality, because of competitive sensitivity of the market data that was sought by the CRTC.

I am concerned that not all of the industry participants have filed responses. We did not see answers from many of the internet telephone service providers. It may be that some have simply failed to serve copies on all interested parties.

Will the CRTC have enough data to fulfill their requirements to keep the accelerated pace of this review? Will the CRTC take action to enforce its interrogatory process?

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CRTC, Local Forbearance, VoIP, Mark Goldberg

Last week, TELUS seemed to own the telecom business press.

4 major announcements: starting last Friday with its broadband capital expansion program, Monday’s income trust, Wednesday’s Ontario government contract win and Thursday’s ground breaking on the $250M Toronto headquarters building. I suspect that members of the press were starting to have trouble running their stories and convincing their editors that they aren’t working for the TELUS PR department.

It is tough work for all the parties, including the reporters who have to find fresh angles for their colour commentary. As a result, both Mark Evans and Catherine McLean picked up on a speculative remark by TELUS CEO that a consumer land line business in Ontario and Quebec, or even international opportunities could represent future sources of growth.

I think these are way, way off into the future, if TELUS goes there at all. There is still a lot of growth to be derived from mobile wireless, both from increased industry-wide penetration of handsets and ARPU enhancement from multi-media content.

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TELUS, Mark Evans, Catherine McLean, Mark Goldberg

6-1-1

Given the choice, as an alternative to calling a carrier for customer support, I would rather undergo root canal treatment performed by a carpenter with a rusty icepick. Insert the name of whatever carrier you want. It dosn’t seem to matter which one of my service providers I happen to call.

I just hate calling 611.

Monday, one of my mobile lines indicated that I had a voice message – but after logging in, the system gave a strange message “Your message is not available at this time; please call back later.” Thus started a 20 hour search for the missing message – a search that needed more than 10 calls into 611.

That’s 10 attempts to get to the right technical support person; 10 times I had to listen to a cheery computer-generated voice take me slowly through an annoying speech recognition menu; 10 times I kept thinking that if my call really was important to them, they wouldn’t have a computer answer the phone.

I hate music-on-hold that sounds like the tuner is just slightly off the station. You keep wanting to reach through the phone to adjust it ever so slightly.

I hate waiting with off-tune music for 10 minutes in a queue, only to have the ring tone at the end suddenly with a fast busy.

I really, really, just hate calling 611.

I know that most of my readers work for communications companies. Let me ask you – do you call the regular customer service numbers for help? Or do you get your assistant to call on your behalf? Even worse, do you have a special employee or executive help desk to bypass the artificial attendent.

If you aren’t being treated like a normal customer, you should change the way you handle employees and executives immediately. You need to see what you are doing to your customers.

Do it now, before you have lousy customer service destroy your brand.