I have frequently written about the regulatory policy tension in balancing quality, coverage and price for telecommunications services. These were key attributes at the foundation of the Canadian government’s policy statements over the past 5 or so years.

There has been an explicit recognition in Canadian policy that the public interest is multi-dimensional, seeking lower prices, while continuing to provide incentives for investment in new technologies and expanded coverage.

A recent blog post by CWTA uses a similar trilogy of terms: value; affordability; and, investment. “Canada’s wireless industry delivering greater value, affordability and investment” criticizes the level of attention “given to one-dimensional and misleading price comparison studies that paint an inaccurate picture of telecom prices and affordability in Canada” and concludes with:

Canada’s economic well-being, safety and quality of life depend on high-quality digital infrastructure. Making world-class telecommunications services available to all Canadians at affordable prices remains the focus of our industry.

No one is saying that Canada has the lowest prices in the world, but contrary to what some would have us believe, Canadian telecom prices are not the most expensive in the world and Canada is not an outlier when it comes to prices. Comparing prices to other countries without factoring in differences in average income levels, quality of service, and cost structures produces misleading results. And as I have written recently, price and affordability are not the same.

As someone who pays bills each month, I too would like lower prices, just as I do for housing, gas, water, electricity, milk, chicken, eggs and everything else. But I also want fast mobile broadband when I am in the suburbs and rural parts of the country. That takes a balance of the various factors that make up the public interest, not just looking at price.

In May, I wrote about an Opensignal report indicating “that Canada’s mobile customers put a value on quality, and will migrate between service providers based on their mobile network experience.”

I had a multi-part Twitter thread on that theme:

Prices are declining, consumers get more data included in plans and at far faster speeds. Aided by regulatory certainty, investments are being accelerated by carriers, expanding the reach and coverage of wireline and wireless networks, both fixed and mobile. Advanced technologies, such as 5G and fibre to the home are not just for Canadians in urban centres, but also in rural and remote regions. More Canadians are signing up for mobile and fixed services every month, evidence of people are finding plans that suit their budgets.

As I wrote last week, we need to do more work to understand and develop solutions for the factors that are inhibiting adoption by those Canadians who have access but have not yet subscribed. That is a different challenge from the industry focus on delivering greater value, affordability and investment.

For more than a decade, I have been writing about the need for governments to turn attention to the challenge of digital adoption, not just building better connections.

Just do a search on my blog for the word “adoption” and you will get see more than 250 posts with such titles as:

• Understanding broadband adoption • November 2010
• Focus on adoption • November 2011
• Increasing digital adoption • June 2015
• To better understand the digital divide • October 2020
• ConnectTO has already failed • February 2021
• The broadband divide’s little secret • April 2021

Last week, I pointed out an important data point about digital engagement from Statistics Canada’s recent report, “Internet use and COVID-19: How the pandemic increased the amount of time Canadians spend online”:

The dramatically lower level of engagement in internet-related activities among unilingual francophones (compared to unilingual anglophones and bilingual Canadians) is an important data point worth further examination. What are the contributing factors? How does this impact service delivery in Quebec for communications services and digital media?

To increase broadband penetration, there are two factors: connections (supply) and adoption (demand). We are spending billions of dollars at all levels of government to improve the quality of connections, but very little is being done to understand the factors that can meaningfully increase digital engagement and adoption.

Why?

At the end of the day, I think it because the problem of connections is actually pretty easy to solve. Connecting any location is a problem that can be clearly defined and solved in engineering terms. We know how to do this. Throw enough money at the problem, and shovels will go in the ground to plant fibre optics and build towers.

Moving the needle on increased adoption is a lot harder challenge. It involves research and study and understanding a variety of human factors. Too many people superficially think that increasing adoption is simply a matter of lower prices, but research has shown there are far more factors involved.

I understand their thinking. I used to think that way as well. It was behind my early work in developing a targeted $10 per month broadband service nearly 15 years ago. Such targeted programs help, but there are more factors at play than just price. Fortunately, there are a lot of lessons being learned from these programs that can help inform the development of other solutions.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a quick answer. The problem of increased broadband adoption can’t be fixed directly by throwing money at it, but we need to undertake more serious research into those factors that stand in the way of people subscribing to broadband.

A new report released yesterday by RBC Economics (“Building Bandwidth: Preparing indigenous youth for a digital future”) says a national skills agenda is required to prepare Indigenous youth for digital future.

Improving the quality of broadband connections is relatively easy; it can be fixed with money. Increasing rates of adoption, improving digital literacy and digital skills is a lot harder.

We need more people (and more research funding) to focus on the harder problem.

Last Thursday, I saw the CRTC mark the 7th anniversary of Canada’s anti-spam legislation (CASL) coming into force with a tweet:

I replied, noting that 7 years ago, I wrote: “CASL is indefensible”, in which I observed that the root of CASL’s problems were that “we strayed too far from trying to target fraud. In doing so, Canada is going to cause harm to the adoption of digital technologies and electronic commerce.”

The main problem with unwanted electronic messages (emails and texts) and calls is fraud: calls and messages that purport to be from someone or some company other than the real caller; or, misrepresenting the goods or services or purpose of the call; or, those continuing to call after being asked to stop.

Those are the communications that we should have been focusing on trying to stop. But those seem to be precisely the ones that are still getting through.

Instead, as predicted, we made life more difficult for legitimate businesses, and that translates into higher costs for Canadians. In December 2017, a Parliamentary Committee report repeatedly recognized the “unintended cost of compliance” in making recommendations for changes to the legislation. Those are unintended costs for Canadian businesses, which ultimately are borne by consumers.

For seven years, the legislative over-reach of CASL has impaired the efficient use of electronic commerce by Canadian businesses and failed to protect Canadians from malicious online threats.

It’s an anniversary that I’m not celebrating.

The Wireless Networking and Communications Group at University of Texas has secured the backing of some significant industry partners in launching 6G@UT, “a research center at UT Austin imagining the future of wireless connectivity at the intersection of immersive sensing and machine learning”.

According to the release,

Founding 6G@UT affiliates Samsung, AT&T, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and InterDigital will each fund at least two projects for three years at the center. Researchers from the companies will work alongside UT faculty members and students to develop wireless-specific machine learning algorithms, advanced sensing technologies, and core networking innovations that will be the backbone of 6G.

Among the initial research thrusts:

• DEEPLY EMBEDDED MACHINE LEARNING: A key novelty for 6G will be a major role for machine learning techniques at all layers in the protocol stack, from the PHY layer up to network and application layers, as well as over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, allowing unprecedented site-specific adaptability and network automation. WNCG has had a strong core of machine learning expertise since before 2010, and has a history of deep collaborations between ML and wireless faculty, unique amongst global wireless research centers.
• NEW SPECTRUM AND TOPOLOGIES: 6G will unleash both new spectrum, e.g. above 100 GHz, and novel spectrum access paradigms that go well beyond the current licensed and unlicensed duopoly. 6G will make new coverage paradigms a reality, including massive LEO satellite constellations as well as self-backhauled small cell deployments, having a profound effect on global broadband coverage.
• PERVASIVE SENSING: Pervasive sensing will feed hungry machine learning algorithms, continuously tuning and reconfiguring the network, while “sensing-as-a-service” will be offered to subscribers and applications. 6G networks will not just be communications systems, but sensing networks that serve as a platform for crowd-sourced sensing; novel wireless sensing techniques will enable delightful new ways for users to interact with devices and to monitor both the users’ physical health.
• NETWORK SLICING AND SHARING: 6G network architectures will enable new revenue streams and the sharing of network and spectrum resources for a set of diverse tenets with different requirements. Building on the emerging ORAN paradigm, 6G networks will enable unprecedented openness, customization, automation, and “softwarization”.

Canada has some significant mobile technology talent working in labs for global telecom giants, as well as 5G testbeds set up by mobile service providers in cooperation with some of our universities across the country.

As the Longhorns of 6G@UT are demonstrating, it is already time to start looking ahead to the next generation of technology.

A recent article in Cartt.ca cited CCSA figures to claim “Large ISPs winning big from UBF”, suggesting that government broadband subsidy programs are skewed toward the biggest service providers in the country.

I have been following the stream of announcements and looked at the figures provided in the article and reach a different conclusion: smaller service providers appear to be getting more than double their share of rural funding program dollars.

According to the article, “Videotron, Cogeco, Bell, Telus and Rogers have been the major winners of UBF funding”, accounting for 70.8% of funds allocated so far. Keep in mind that Cogeco isn’t one of the 5 biggest telecommunications services providers in the country; Shaw is. According to the CRTC, “The five largest providers of telecommunications services (including affiliates) accounted for 87.3% of total revenues in 2019.”

Cogeco is a significant rural service provider and (according to CCSA figures) it has won 22% of the government funding. But it isn’t part of the CRTC’s “Big 5”. Dropping Cogeco from the list of major funding winners, we see that the service providers that provide 87% of Canadians services have won less than half of the funding.

In other words, service providers with just 12.7% of the revenues have been awarded 51.2% of the government funding.

That is four times their ‘fair share’. CCSA is quoted in the article saying “We’re concerned that this focus on the larger players is going to have a detrimental impact on the ability of consumers in rural areas to actually get the kind of service that they are used to getting, and that they want to get from their local provider”.

The figures don’t support a statement that there is a “focus on the larger players”. It appears to me that smaller service providers are doing well in winning government funding awards.