Very few sentences get me going more than the words ‘Please hold the line, your call is important to us.’

Sure.

Let’s face it. If my call really was important to them, the company would hire more people to answer my call and not have to route me through an IVR.

Instead, many companies are implementing human-like interactive voice systems that seem better suited to frustrate the hell out of their customers, rather than speed their call to the right person.

Enter Get Human: www.gethuman.com is a site with an inventory of bypass codes to get around the IVR jail that traps so many of us. Will it do any good? Not likely, but it probably helped the website’s founder, Paul English, avoid some anger management therapy sessions.

Telecom industry: take note. There is frustration building out there.

And we’re on this topic, tell me why I have to enter my phone number and my language selection more than once?

Michael Urlocker had an interesting comment on my holiday weekend posting. He suggests that Skype is the competition for phone service and then asks if Skype is disruptive or destructive.

It is instructive to go back 25 years, when the post office was seen as competition by the telecom industry. After all, people made phone calls for Mother’s Day as a substitute for sending cards. The new telecopier capability, now called fax, was seen as the ultimate substitute for mail.

Telecom services are facing other behavioural shifts as a new generation communicates with a range of tools that simply didn’t exist before.

Sharing music or other files, instant messaging (with or without voice), mobility: These are all parts of the multi-disciplinary analysis to sort out the sources of competition over the next few years.

Victor Dwyer, writing in this weekend’s Globe and Mail, asked why he is paying for Touch tone service.

Would you still need to pay for obvious features like this in a truly competitive world of local telecom? Call your local cable company and ask them if they charge for tone dialing. Try to get service without it.

Ask Bell why they still charge. Their initial answer will be that they have to – it is in their tariffs, and they will likely add that the CRTC won’t let them waive the fee. Technically, that is correct, but don’t forget to ask if Bell has asked the CRTC for permission to reduce the price of local service to eliminate the charge. That would be the CRTC’s response: Bell is free to apply for a rate reduction. But what company could reasonably be expected to offer such a discount to every customer.

That is not how competition works.

A fully competitive market means that the price reduction would not have to be applied across the board. Some people would get better discounts than others.

Not fair, you say? Gee, I know of lots of people who paid less for their car than me; less for their clothes, their computer, their flowers and lots of other stuff. Of course, I paid less for a few things – I think.

Don’t get me started talking about prices for hotel rooms.

But these are all fully competitive markets.

So, keep asking why you still have to pay for touchtone. It’s a good example of the benefits that can arise from opening up the Local Services market.

We’re heading to a Muskoka auction today, since the weather has made for less than ideal boating, golfing, or anything else cottage-like.

I can’t help but think of the use of auctions as the perfect tool to match the value of a good to the willingness of a buyer to pay. A little discipline is needed to help prevent the excitement driving you to spend $5 too much on a butter churn.

An auction is the system that Barrett is seeking for determining the recipient of an underserved territory subsidy. It is the system that the Telecom Policy Review panel recommended. Barrett has launched a Cabinet appeal of the deferral account decision which awarded the subsidy to the incumbent telephone companies.

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Which of the following principles are found in the Broadcasting Act?:

1. maximum use of Canadian creative and other resources
2. readily adaptable to scientific and technological change
3. reliance on market forces
4. do not inhibit the development of information technologies

Broadcasting has always been its own particular world, but observers of that world are saying that it’s getting harder and harder to divine what exactly is behind the CRTC’s thinking.

Radio broadcasters are up before the Commission this week, and while it seems pretty clear the radio business is facing some serious challenges — youth now listening to half the radio their elders do; using the cell phone, computer and the Internet to satisfy a third or more of their media/entertainment needs — radio is profitable now, and hence, indications are, the Commission will extract some form of greater “Cancon” contribution. On the other hand, as this site has discussed, the Commission has walked away from broadcast regulation of the mobile space and imposed a minimalist regulatory regime on satellite radio. How all this gets squared in the future is anybody’s guess.

Then witness the Pay TV decision this week. As the Globe reported Friday morning, 4 years of Burger’s life gone, and he’s left wondering why the other guy got the nod, why the Commission introduced a modicum of competition but went back to its old practice of “picking winners” rather than letting the market decide. And new specialty services (basically pay services, but with advertising) are left wondering why they no longer get guaranteed access, but this Allarco service does.

If there’s a consistent pattern here, it doesn’t seem to be in the Broadcasting Act.

And by the way, the answer is all but #3.