After months of preparation, it is just about ‘Showtime’ for The 2006 Canadian Telecom Summit. Construction is underway as the stage is getting installed through the weekend. The WiFi is already up and running and I can’t wait for our espresso bar to arrive on-site.

This is our 5th annual schmoozefest of the most influential leaders of the Canadian telecom industry – both speakers and delegates. This year, we have again attracted a stellar line-up of speakers and record audience and the agenda will explore some important issues.

I will post from the conference as time permits. Stay tuned or even better, register and join us!

Building global communities are themes discussed by disciples of Marketing 2.0. Global communities – connecting over the internet, collaborative work tools – you know the mantra.

Recently, a number of family members were commenting that there haven’t been any new jokes coming into our inboxes recently. The same jokes are being recycled.

Anyone else notice that? I think this is noteworthy. My late Uncle Norman used to say that you either need new jokes or new friends. When the entire world is connected, you can’t get new friends; you have them all.

Does this mean that we have already circulated all the jokes?

I’d like to see a couple economics students look at this: run a regression analysis over time, looking at growth in internet penetration, total jokes received in inbox, jokes that are new, jokes worth forwarding.

Is this a leading indicator that the internet has peaked?

We’re going high tech next week for the silent auction at The Canadian Telecom Summit. Powered by ooober.com, a neat wireless applications house that will be presenting at The Canadian Telecom Summit, bids for the auction will be submitted by text messaging.

The chairman of ooober is presenting on the Wireless Applications Panel at The Summit.

Another panel that should be attracting greater interest, especially in the wake of last week’s terror related arrests, is looking at Illegal Content on the Internet. Does the industry have a role in policing or investigation of illegal activity using the internet? Is there a common carrier defense? Is it legal to block illegal content? Should illegal content enjoy a digital exemption to laws controlling the importation of illegal material? Interesting issues to be explored Monday afternoon, June 12.

The consulting firm of Lemay-Yates was commissioned by the 4 biggest cable companies together with Allstream and Primus, to prepare a study of international regulatory regimes treatment of VoIP. The report was attached to the submission of the cable companies in the CRTC VoIP reconsideration proceeding. In the report’s summary, the authors note:

This sounds somewhat consistent with the solution we proposed last year – unbundling the access from the voice application. Examine the state of competition for the access link separately from the application riding on the access.

Our approach did not require a mandated unbundling of voice from the local loop. We suggested that the loop could continue to be regulated as a bottleneck facility. If any applications, including voice, are bundled with the loop, then the CRTC’s bundling rules would apply. However, if applications are not bundled with the loop, then there is no reason to apply economic regulation to the application, which is fully competitive.

Such an approach allows technical neutrality, while the regulatory analysis is done on the basis of proper decomposition of the component parts. This approach accommodates wireless and wireline in a consistent manner.