Last week, Rob Carrick had an article in the Globe and Mail entitled “Inflation, as tracked in bagels, bacon and pints of beer”.

In it, he talks about different measures of inflation sent in by readers, and notes that the rate of inflation has been rising, from 1% year-over-year at the start of the year to a rate of 3.6% in May.

His article includes a link to a personal inflation rate calculator from Statistics Canada.

When you calculate your personal inflation rate, be grateful for the communications component. I found it interesting to see that communications show a negative inflation rate; prices are 7.2% lower year over year.

For more than a year now, each month I have been tracking a Cellular Consumer Price Index, released coincidentally with the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) from Statistics Canada. It shows cellular prices have dropped 17% between May 2020 and May 2021. Since January 2019, the Cell CPI is down nearly 28%.

That merits repeating: Statistics Canada data shows the Cellular Consumer Price Index is 28% lower than it was in January 2019.

Bacon isn’t a component of my personal monthly spending basket, but bagels, beer and communications services are.

Statistics Canada usually updates its baskets every two years to reflect changing spending patterns using Canadian household expenditure data. Last month, the agency announced “As a result of the unexpected and profound changes in consumption habits because of the pandemic, the basket weight update, planned for February 2021, was delayed. This delay has allowed the impact of COVID-19 on consumer spending behaviours to be better understood”.

The new weightings show a 15% drop in the communications weightings, from 3.55% in 2017 to 3.03% in 2020. Telephone services, which include cellular services, is responsible for all of that, falling more than 25% from 2.39% to 1.77%. Internet services have held steady, shifting marginally from 1.06% to 1.07%. At 4.86%, the “alcohol, tobacco and cannabis” category is now weighted more than 60% higher than communications in the price index weightings based on Canadian consumer spending.

The June 2021 CPI figures will be released July 28, and will use the latest weightings and 2020 reference period.

How did the CRTC find itself in the position of funding the person generating the kind of speech in this tweet?

You might be surprised to learn the CRTC ordered nearly $13,000 to be paid to the author of this clearly hurtful, if not outright hateful, tweet. [Update: As of July 29, Twitter suspended his account for violating its rules against hateful conduct.]

How did this happen? Two years ago, Bell Canada proposed using $125,000 remaining in its deferral account to defray the costs of interveners participating in CRTC regulatory proceedings to make regulations under the Accessible Canada Act. The CRTC agreed.

Two months ago, on May 13, the CRTC issued a series of decisions awarding funds to a number of groups:

• Telecom Order CRTC 2021-170: $4,180 to the Canadian Association of the Deaf
• Telecom Order CRTC 2021-171: $7,872.75 to Media Access Canada
• Telecom Order CRTC 2021-172: $4,747 to the Canadian National Society of the Deaf-Blind
• Telecom Order CRTC 2021-173: $5,170 to the CNIB Foundation
• Telecom Order CRTC 2021-174: $22,777.50 to Deaf Wireless Canada Consultative Committee
• Telecom Order CRTC 2021-175: $16,815.10 to the Community Media Advocacy Centre

Let’s focus on the last of those cost awards. Of the $16,815.10 awarded to CMAC in Telecom Order CRTC 2021-175, $12,875 went to pay its consultant, the author of the Tweet above, just one of dozens of examples of venom spewed on his Twitter account.

How could the CRTC have missed the context of ordering payment for his participation in a regulatory proceeding?

There is a clue in the third paragraph of each of the Telecom Orders listed above:

3. The Commission noted that Bell Canada did not submit, as part of its proposal, that it required the opportunity to respond to applications for a share of the available funds. In the circumstances, the Commission considered that such responses were unnecessary.

Keep in mind that deferral account funds were ear-marked for a public purpose, so one might ask if it was appropriate for the CRTC to use a standard of “what Bell asked for”. Indeed, the standard appears to have been “what Bell didn’t explicitly ask for”.

Unlike most cost award processes, the CRTC chose to short circuit the reply phase to the applications and as a result, it did not have the benefit of public input to help inform the process by which the Commission reached its conclusions. Paragraph 6 states: “CMAC submitted that it is a non-profit organization that represents the interests of people with disabilities who are Indigenous or racialized, or who identify as women, and that offers advocacy and support to these groups.” Would that submission hold up under further scrutiny?

With input, the CRTC might have reconsidered its determination in Paragraph 12 that “CMAC has demonstrated that it meets the first criterion by representing people with disabilities who are Indigenous or racialized, or who identify as women, and by elaborating on its membership and expertise.”

The cost awards in May used up about half of the funding set aside from the deferral account. The CRTC may want to reconsider its processes for any further distributions.

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.