I had an interesting discussion this afternoon with some family members about the challenges of living within our celebrated Canadian health care system.

It seems that conversations about privatizing portions of the system always seem to polarize people. The main concerns are creation of two tiers of health care and taking resources away from the vulnerable. The assumption is always that the public side will lose the best providers.

Which seems to me to be an acknowledgement that we are not properly compensating the health care providers. But this isn’t a blog about health care; how, Professor does this connect to Telecom Trends?

I’m glad you asked. It seems to me that discussions about Network Neutrality have some elements in common with the debates about universal health care. People who are concerned about the emergence of a multi-tier Internet are ignoring the fact that business already has created just that. Not satisfied with the vagaries of public internet quality of service, enterprise IP networks are often built on private or managed networks. Much like the wealthy and our politicians seem to be able to jump the queue for MRIs and elective surgery.

Complaints about evil, profit minded ‘broadband monopolists‘ (as Russell Shaw calls them) sound like the way the Toronto Star writes about those evil American firms offering MRIs and CT scans to Canadians. How dare they want to offer a service that people are willing to pay for at a price that makes sense for the investors! Quick, we need legislation to protect these feeble minded citizens who don’t know how to make decisions for themselves.

At the same time, I agree that there is much to be said for the creativity and breadth of applications that have been generated using the current model of open internet – just as there is much to be said for the Canadian principle that says you don’t lose your life savings just because you got sick.

Is it not possible to have both public and private models co-exist? When mediocrity [and I say that in the nicest possible way!] is good enough, the current model works just fine. But if an application, or an application provider, needs something more, what is wrong with them paying to get it?

It would help if someone can explain the wide-open view without resorting to Communist style language that I thought died out when the Berlin Wall fell. Let’s have an open discussion of the issues without resorting to calling telcos and cablecos ‘broadband monopolists’. If Bay Street or Wall Street really believed that there is a monopoly for broadband access, BCE wouldn’t still be hovering below $30.

I never cease to be amazed at how creative the university campus environment can be. Taking technologies and finding serendipidous uses.

A story on the AP wires speaks about the way a number of faculty at Georgia College & State University are using podcasting as a way to distribute course material. A history class has made better use of lecture time by having films downloaded to the small screen that otherwise would need to be seen in class.

A psychology professor has found an iPod supplement to office hours and tutorials: he podcasts the week’s most asked questions. Other ideas could turn iPods into portable yearbooks and replace campus brochures with podcasts.

At Duke University, incoming freshmen handed iPod devices as welcoming gifts; foreign language students use iPods to immerse themselves in coursework.

There are trends here worth considering, beyond the move to upgrade the quality of correspondence courses. As websites start generating podcasts, storage requirements will increase, there will be room for a content mediation business to emerge – kind of an eBay for podcasts.

Telecom and technology executives and product development folks need to go back to university – just to spend time watching what is happening on campus.

I’m not sure that it is fair to say, as Mark Evans does today, that Canada and the CRTC lags the rest of the world in addressing Net Neutrality issues. A number of such issues came up in the original VoIP proceeding in 2004 and 2005 and the CRTC addressed them. You may not like how the CRTC resolved the issues, but it isn’t fair to say that the issues are being ignored.

For example, as early as 1997, the CRTC made statements about technological neutrality for network interconnection. This principle was upheld in 2005 in requiring IP interconnection and ongoing monitoring to ensure carriers are playing nicely. One of those monitoring reports came out earlier this week.

During the VoIP proceeding, the CRTC specifically addressed a few issues that are part of the Net Neutrality debate. They ruled that tariff restrictions for both cable companies and telcos that limited voice services being offered by competitors over cable and DSL broadband pipes had to be removed.

In assessing the issue of discriminatory access, the CRTC reviewed submissions and determined that it already had sufficient tools to guard against abuses of neutrality. For example, Section 27(2) of the Telecom Act already forbids unjust discrimination.

Just because the CRTC chose not to come out with a new rule called ‘Internet Neutrality’ doesn’t mean that elements of the principle aren’t already enshrined in our laws and rules.

It is on the basis of these existing rules that Vonage filed its complaint against Shaw. We have due process in this country – both sides get to air their positions.

In dealing with the new frontier, we don’t necessarily need to throw out all the old rules and start writing new ones. We have been looking for consistency and predictability from our regulator.

Its position on net neutrality is pretty good for an agency that was one of the first in the world to address VoIP.

The rumour is that Qwest might be the next major acquisition in the US consolidation sweepstakes. It is ironic that the first Baby Bell (US WEST) to get hooked up with a long haul provider (Qwest) is the last one standing in search of a suiter.

The word on the street is that Verizon, the company that beat out Qwest in bidding for MCI, may be looking at bulking up across the northwest to better prepare to go to battle against the new AT&T.;

At what point will US cable companies tie up with Sprint to offer a competitive triple/quad play? Cable needs the wireless and Sprint needs local access. Sounds like a match to me.

My brother mentioned to me that his office installed a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) recently and he says that it is saving him 20-30 minutes per day. Now that his corporate mail is completely tied into his Blackberry, he only reads a message once – either at his desk or on his mobile, but not both. He files messages once, deletes them once.

The time saving is the big benefit to the user; but the BES represents major handcuffs on users looking at alternative solutions for mobile email. That is a bonus for RIM.

At the end of the day, mobile devices are consumer electronics – subject to fashion and style trends (the “cool” factor) as much as they rely on having raw capabilities. Technology advantages can be transient – creative manufacturers will add features to match or beat their competition. Cool is harder to copy and cool makes it harder to stay on top: look at the current wave that Motorola is riding and ask Nokia about suddenly losing consumer momentum.

It seems to me that BES is an answer to how RIM can insulate themselves, in part, from some of the fickleness of the marketplace. Analysts should look at the percentage of subscribers that use carrier Blackberry Web Clients versus subscribers with Blackberry Exchange Servers. It is a metric that will help understand how secure is the Blackberry client base.