The CRTC is clearing out some old files – maybe working its way to the bottom of the IN basket?

Last week, it gave final approval to Bell’s High Speed Metro service. This is a local fibre based service to allow businesses to buy direct, point-to-point optical connections. Bell filed the original application for the service nearly 3 years ago (June 10, 2003).

Maybe the paper was starting to yellow from age; more likely, it’s foreshadowing the Commission will be dealing with other high speed applications on Thursday when it releases its decision on Local forbearance.

Watch for Thursday’s decision to possibly combine the outcomes of two Public Notices – Local Exchange Services (PN 2005-2); and High Speed Intra-exchange Services (PN 2005-8).

It’s a deal… Lucent and Alcatel have tied the knot and will be merging to form a US$25B telecom giant.

The merged company, to be headed up by Lucent president Pat Russo will be cutting about 8800 jobs – 10% of the current workforce – and some of those are possibly going to be in Ottawa. Although on one hand, the public statements boast that the combined company will have “The industry’s premier R&D; capabilities, including Bell Labs, with 26,100 R&D engineers and scientists throughout the world“, the press release indicates that savings will:

Leveraging R&D; across a larger base could mean that Lucatel or Alcacent will be looking at labs that duplicate efforts. The companies are both strong players in DSL – watch for Bell Labs to come out on top in any turf battle, given that Russo is the CEO. Alcatel has a large presence in Canada, with both sales, operations and research – thanks to its acquisition of Newbridge nearly 6 years ago.

Bell Labs will continue to be headquartered in New Jersey and Lucent is preserving certain corporate structures in order to continue to fulfill US Government obligations for some strategic contracts. Other corporate structures are also being created to fulfill French requirements.

There is an opportunity for Canada to grow its role in the combined company as global mandates are defined during the integration activities. It seems to me that some locations will be winners and some will be losers. Winners will perform R&D; for the combined entity and will see their budgets (and staff counts) grow; losers will see some of their staff offered jobs elsewhere and the rest let go.

Our governments – federal and provincial – have created incentives to keep auto and airplane assembly lines open. We’ll soon see where telecom R&D;, Ottawa’s technology core, fits into Canada’s industrial priorities.

Musings on a weekend…

There are a bunch of people who have made a career out of calling the Internet a stupid network¹ – to distinguish it from the Intelligent Networks of traditional telecom service providers. We are told that ‘Stupid’ is the new good – Intelligent is evil.

I’m not sure the model fits. Thinking about the evolution of the network, with tiers for business, PVNs, managed services, deep packet inspection, prioritization, gatekeeper fees, etc. Is that really a stupid network?

Increasingly, it seems that IP networks are becoming application-aware. And conversely, some applications are now needing to consider more of the network characteristics, their variations and their limitations.

Why? In part, it may be because the communist ideal hasn’t worked. Certain applications appear to have human like behaviour: they hog as much bandwidth as they can without consideration for other applications or other users.

Hence the need to apply a little control, a little discipline. I have written about ‘Irrelevant Networks‘ where I wrote:

If another user or application wants to break through the traffic jam of mediocrity, and indeed, the user is willing to pay a premium to do so, network providers will be happy to accommodate them. Perhaps this puts another spin on the Shaw – Vonage file.

The intelligence of the network may have migrated to the edge, but there still seems to be smarts in the network. The new architecture lays the foundation for access network providers to custom design access to match user needs. It might explain why network providers are looking at charging differential fees to tune the service to match the user expectations for service quality.

That sounds like a reasonable business practice and maybe not so ‘Stupid’ afterall.

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¹ Look at David Isenberg’s The Rise of The Stupid Network for the root of the terminology.

At long last, Inukshuk‘s national wireless service took flight today with offerings by both of its owners, Bell and Rogers. Mark Evans writes about the two offerings and laments the lack of a real national broadband alternative. He rightfully acknowledges the interesting exception in Western Canada where Inukshuk’s infrastructure allows Bell and Rogers to become two new alternatives to Shaw and TELUS.

It all just doesn’t seem to hold up to the dream that was announced by Inukshuk’s founding shareholders Allstream, Microcell and NR Communications back in November 2003. At that time, John McLennan said:

The excitement for that strategy didn’t seem last very long. Only a few months later, Allstream merged with MTS and shed Inukshuk. When the CRTC and the TPR panel have been continuing to drive a facilities-based competition policy, Allstream’s sale of its interest in Inukshuk appears to be one a major miss.

Is there a market for pure roaming internet? We’ll see how Sympatico Unplugged and Rogers Portable Internet play out. I’d still like to see any of the fixed line broadband players come out with Inukshuk-based churn-innoculation against the community broadband initiatives with an ‘away from home’ roaming service: Get the wireless service as an adjunct to your residential fixed service for when you are on-the-road.

Just as RIM has emerged from its patent troubles south of the border, another Canadian manufacturer has been slapped with accusations that they have copied an American manufacturer’s designs.

In what looks more like an early April Fool’s story, Victoria’s Secret has accused Montreal-based La Senza of infringing on its wireless bra.

La Senza appears to be saying the suit is without foundation. CEO Irving Teitelbaum expects this issue is getting media coverage because “it is a lot more exciting than softwood lumber.”

And more fun than deferral accounts, too. It is somewhat uplifting for us to see that wireless technology is being used in other industries – it adds a new dimension to the level of wireless support Quebec has been providing.

Your comments are welcome.