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.

I’ll be leading a module tomorrow morning at the Executive Development Program which is run by University of Toronto’s Master of Engineering in Telecom program. I have to say that I enjoy being on campus through the year to deliver the couple lectures to the Master’s program and it is also a rush to be in front of 60 high energy, high potential management employees of the carriers, manufacturers and government.

Hopefully, we’ll get some good discussion going – for me, it’s warm-up time for the big show in 4 weeks, the launch of The 2006 Canadian Telecom Summit.

While we can argue about whether the Commander-in-Chief (you know, the guy who is empowered to overturn verdicts and pardon death-row criminals) is allowed to authorize access to your phone records, hopefully there is no disagreement over whether the police can simply use web search engines to help find criminal behaviour.

I’m talking run-of-the-mill web-surfing. That’s what Maryland fire inspectors did to crack a case of 17 fires over the past 4 months.

And today’s winners of the coveted ‘what-the-heck-was-I-thinking’ award are the two teenaged arsonists who bragged about their exploits, complete with photos, to their friends on MySpace.com.

I’m waiting for their lawyer to file suit for unreasonable search. After all, it’s called MySpace, not OurSpace.

Safety tip, kids: the internet is a pretty wide open public space. When bragging about arson, shop-lifting or whatever helps pick up dates these days, you may want to try some other approach.