I usually view ‘sponsored content’ with a grain or two of salt, recognizing that the articles are effectively advertisements. But by no means would I say that there isn’t valuable information to be found in those articles.

Case in point: a tweet from the new Chief Marketing Officer at Qualcomm steered me toward an article in Axios, “How 5G is creating new experiences, transforming industries and enriching lives”.

It was a reminder that 5G isn’t just about delivering faster speeds to our smart phones (which it does). The evolution to 5G also enables connectivity to far more devices within a given area, in the order of a million connections per square kilometer. Many of these devices may not need high speed, but network connectivity will enable a world of new applications.

The Qualcomm sponsored content speaks of 3 application areas: Education, Health Care and Manufacturing. The article served to remind me of the 5G Canada Council 5GCC.ca website that includes a number of resources, describing even more applications and the impact on sectors in a Canadian context, such as “Accelerating 5G in Canada – Benefits for Cities and Rural Communities” from Accenture Strategy.

There has been a lot of skepticism about the promise of 5G technology, as well as a lot of unwarranted and completely unfounded health concerns. Among the benefits of the investment in 5G networks will be a reduced carbon footprint as described in “The Role of 5G in the Fight Against Climate Change”.

Yesterday, Ookla (the company behind Speedtest) announced the acquisition of Solutelia, to complement its tools for mobile network testing and measurements. As the media release observes, “The advent of 5G is resulting in substantial changes to the physical footprint of networks, which will require more cell sites and more intelligent, complex radio networks. This radical shift in the industry means that network operators need to be able to massively scale their testing and optimization efforts, without a commensurate increase in operational spending.”

As the mid-band 3.5GHz spectrum auction wraps later this week, it is worthwhile reviewing the kinds of opportunities driving these generational levels of capital investment by Canada’s (and the world’s) communications companies. There will be benefits enabled by 5G for all segments: rural and urban; consumers and enterprise; small business and entrepreneurs; farming, health care, manufacturing, transportation, retail. Across Canada, hundreds of communities, large and small, have already been 5G enabled.

What applications can you envision from a world of networked everything?

Ontario’s commitment of nearly $4B to connect every region in the province to high-speed internet by the end of 2025 is laudable and ambitious. But it doesn’t go far enough.

The provincial government estimates that there are 700,000 unserved or underserved homes in the province, and its new program aims to “leverage existing utility infrastructure and rights of way to reduce required subsidies and compress delivery timelines”.

According to the press release,

Ontario is now one of the few jurisdictions in Canada with its own comprehensive and proactive plan to achieve full connectivity. Over the coming weeks, the Province plans on announcing more projects to bring connectivity to communities throughout the province, along with additional details on how it will help ensure every region in Ontario has access to high-speed internet.

Ontario Connects: Ontario’s high-speed internet plan, is part of Infrastructure Ontario. Of course, building internet connections is an infrastructure project, but as I have written recently, construction of broadband access only addresses the “easy” part of the connectivity equation.

Universal access can be achieved by throwing money at solving the challenges of construction. Expressed in syllogistic logic terms, it is a necessary, but insufficient condition for universal connectivity.

Universal broadband adoption is a lot tougher. As we have learned (see “The broadband divide’s little secret”), it isn’t just a matter of lower prices. And as we have seen with the city of Toronto’s approach to Connect TO, some people confuse the issues, likely because building broadband is a much easier problem to define and solve. It is so much harder to understand the human factors that inhibit universal adoption of information and communications technology.

But doesn’t that mean it is a challenge toward which we need to be turning our attention?

It isn’t enough to build universal access to better broadband. We need to do more to understand the factors keeping us from universal adoption.

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.