I don’t always agree with the CRTC’s decisions and I know they don’t always agree with my views either. I have written before that the sign of a balanced decision is an equal level of kvetching from incumbents, new entrants and consumer groups.

The Cabinet’s decision to have the CRTC revisit their VoIP Decision is a return to the way these things are supposed to work. Cabinet provides policy direction and leaves it to the CRTC to figure out how to address the issue in regulatory terms. It may signal a change in the way the industry is going to operate.

New blogger Michael Urlocker is advising people and companies on recognizing and responding to disruptive changes; try to imagine the amount of change that has been required for the evolution of the CRTC within government organizational and budget constraints, including minority governments, with the level of technology and global regulatory change over the past 15 years. Look at the Commission’s 3 year plan and you see a very full agenda.

This year’s closing speaker at The Canadian Telecom Summit will be CRTC Chair Charles Dalfen. Industry Minister Maxime Bernier will be speaking the day before with a response to the Telecom Policy Review panel’s recommendations. With his term coming to an end at the end of the year, it is fitting that Chairman Dalfen will get to deliver the final word.

Feeling confident in the wake of winning their VoIP appeal, Bell, TELUS, Sasktel and Aliant filed a joint appeal of the Local Forbearance Decision from the CRTC.

With all of the OpEds in the newspapers over the past few weeks, we knew an appeal was coming. The VoIP appeal took almost a year (including an election and new government to take power) for a decision. Today’s appeal asks for a response in 90 days.

Phone companies feeling frustrated? No question. But I think I would have slept on the press release overnight before sending it out. The language is a little harsh – especially for a combined company press release.

I just wonder what is to accomplished by using language in the press release like referring to the CRTC’s “inability or unwillingness to reform telecom regulation” and how “it is out of touch with today’s market realities.” Of course, the quotes are unattributed, so all four companies have ‘plausible deniability.’

We’re waiting to get confirmation that Barrett Xplore has also appealed a CRTC decision to the Cabinet. As we reported earlier, we expected the Deferral Account Decision to be appealed.¹

It all adds more gunpowder to the fireworks that we’ll be seeing next month at The Canadian Telecom Summit.

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¹ Update: Barrett Xplore will be filing its appeal on Tuesday (May 16)

At last, Bell has settled its pay equity dispute which should make for an easier time for CEO Michael Sabia and Chair Richard Currie at the June 7 AGM. The last few years have had extra demonstrations of shareholder participation by union members leveraging the opportunity to put their complaints in front of the general meeting of shareholders.

TELUS’ AGM was noteworthy a few weeks ago in that Darren Entwistle did not have to deal with a hostile union for the first time since he took the helm.

It looks like Bell may be looking for a similarly quiet meeting. Caterers: have those sandwich platters ready early this year.

Network reliability is a theme that keeps a lot of network managers up at night.

Some networks consciously ignore the issue, or seem to proudly announce scheduled service outages for 8-24 hours or more.¹

Others, like Kentucky-based cable company Insight Communications, have problems associated with unexpected consequences of a network upgrade. It doesn’t matter who operates the network. Networks will occasionally fail. When everything is working, it’s hard to tell the service providers apart. Excellence shows up when there are problems. Superior companies are differentiated by how they respond to problems – or how they avoid problems altogether.

In a slightly related note – thanks to my roots in mathematics, I can find inspiration in tangents – I have been troubled by the deteriorating road conditions in my neighbourhood. For some reason, this has been a particularly bad spring for roads caving in. We had parts of one major street (Finch Avenue West) washed away in a downpour last summer and then the corner of Highway 7 and Jane decided to go for a swim at the beginning of February. Sheppard Avenue decided to join in the fun last month. These repairs are still slowly underway. Today, I noticed a cone in the middle of Centre Street which seems to indicate that last summer’s sewer repairs weren’t done properly and we will get to watch another street crumble.

There is a common thread here. Cities are having trouble keeping up with maintenance of the critical infrastructure that they are responsible for. None of these 4 streets are little neighbourhood roads. We’re talking major roads – 4-6 lanes with thousands of cars per day travelling on them. Millions of dollars of economic impact. Yet I don’t see maintenance crews working on weekends, working at night. In the case of the Finch Avenue repairs, it took three months before repair construction even started!

It is irrelevant that excuses will blame the lack of urgency on budget restrictions. What concerns me is that people think that telecommunications facilities belong in the hands of cities. That cities could then operate condominium fibre or wireless networks for the service providers – as a public utility. Fine in theory – but it falls apart in practice.

As I said above, networks will occasionally fail. I don’t want the same people who are in charge of planning, operating, maintaining and restoring my streets to be the folks fixing my network.

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¹ See my earlier posts about Xanga.com’s migration to a larger data centre and the CRTC’s scheduled outage due to a building power upgrade.

Last week, Toronto Hydro Telecom announced that it has selected Siemens to power its city-wide WiFi project.

Want to see a preview of the network in operation? Register now for The 2006 Canadian Telecom Summit, June 12-14, 2006 where Toronto Hydro Telecom will be powering the onsite WiFi services being provided to all delegates.