With the coming merger of Aliant into Bell’s regional income trust, BCE has put forward the first indication of its management team. Jay Forbes, the current CEO of Aliant will be stepping aside on July 1 to make room for the return of Stephen Wetmore to Aliant. Wetmore has been a past president of Aliant and at NewTel – so this is a return to the Atlantic region for him, having grabbed a hold of much of the land mass of Ontario and Quebec as a prize to bring back with him.

By replacing Forbes with Wetmore, BCE keeps east coast credibility in the Aliant home base. In many cases, Aliant is seemingly inextricably linked with the provincial governments. With the level of competition coming from the cable companies in Aliant’s home turf, leadership is required who fully appreciate the way consumers, businesses and governments respond. His time at BCE has provided a base for assuming control of an integrated Bell / Aliant trust.

Stephen Wetmore was a keynote speaker at our very first Canadian Telecom Summit in 2002. We wish him luck trying to stem the tidewaters of competition – heading back home to Aliant.

I was visiting with family in the Kawarthas (about 2 hours east and north of Toronto) today and I couldn’t help but notice the signs advertising Wireless High Speed Internet along all of the major roads that I was on approaching this cottage and rural community.

But my cousin still uses dial-up access. One of their questions was whether the “free government broadband” would help them. That’s right, they are holding off in buying this service because they think that the government may have a freebie coming their way.

I actually hope it ain’t so. It seems to me that if there is an entrepreneur offering service in the area, then the last thing my tax dollars should be doing is competing against them! I’m not crazy about the idea of misguided Robin Hood entitlements – let’s be clear: this is not an impoverished region.

There is definitely a role for government assistance in completely unserved territory, but let’s not have government compete against the private sector. And let’s also make sure that there is sufficient public clarity about the government’s plans in order to remove any overhang that may be inhibiting demand in areas outside the traditional telco/cable duopoly.

I see Om Malik has picked up on a theme I raised last week – that access independent VoIP may just not be there in terms of acting as a replacement for the general public. Sure, it’s cheaper and gives virtual numbers, but, as Om summarized, users lose reliability, sound quality and emergency access.

I’ll note that these complaints do not apply to the digital voice products coming from the cable companies or the phone companies, such as Bell’s Digital Voice. But those services are access dependent – you buy the voice application from the same carrier as your access wiring – and lose the nomadic capability. That is how the carrier controls the quality, manages the reliability and gives accurate 911 address information. What these products lack is just some of the ‘cool’ factor and so far, there is no great price advantage.

At least in Canada, we seem to prefer an orderly market, allowing the cable companies to enter the voice business with healthy margins, but sacrificing some of the vigourous price competition that consumers might otherwise enjoy.

A year after the CRTC set in place its rules for VoIP, we’ll be looking at all aspects of the competitive marketplace – both access independent and dependent voice products – at The 2006 Canadian Telecom Summit on June 12-14.

Since Mark Evans and Jon Arnold are both talking subscription radio, and following up on my earlier post about the CRTC’s recent Mobile TV Decision, I thought we could take an additional look at where this could go.

Mark Evans isn’t crazy about searching through the 100 plus stations of satellite radio – think of it like digital TV without the big screen channel guide. Isn’t this even more of a reason to integrate a subscription capability into the mobile phone?

I see a hybrid of live programming and audio on demand. Integrating subscription radio with podcasting. Someone mentions an interesting bite from Stern’s show at work and you grab it to play back later. Or Dr. Laura. Jon’s live programming choice will obviously be the Red Sox channel. But with a proper widget design, why couldn’t users pluck any streaming audio feed from anywhere?

It just seems to me that mobile radio makes even more sense than mobile tv. You can listen while you’re driving or working, reading, gardening or fishing.

Maybe the folks at CHUM (who lost out on subscription radio) will be interested in an unregulated back door.

Google is under heat for conforming to Chinese law by limiting the scope of searches delivered by the ‘google.cn’ version of its search engine.

It seems to me that this isn’t about censorship or freedom. The core issue is whether nations have sovereignty over their domestic communications networks and services. The FCC has rules about what can be carried over the US airwaves (just ask the radio networks that carried Howard Stern or look at the results of Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction).

Here in Canada, the CRTC censors simulcast US commercials, a problem that is especially troubling during the Super Bowl broadcasts, denying Canadians access to the Bud Bowl and Go Daddy. Instead we are served up the Canadian Tire guy.

However, in its Mobile TV Decision, the CRTC expresses the view that content delivered over ‘the Internet’ is free of its regulation. Note this does not apply to networks just using IP, but solely to those using the big cloud, capital ‘I’ Internet.

It is interesting that even the Telecom Policy Review panel, with all of its free market language, discusses limits on illegal content. Hank Intven, one of the TPR panel members, will moderate the session looking at Illegal Content at The Canadian Telecom Summit in June.