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It seems that problems with busy period engineering affects the government as well as the private sector.

Canada Revenue Agency has had to extend the deadline for e-filing tax returns because its servers have had trouble keeping up with traffic loads this week. It is a scene reminiscent of Boxing Day blues for some Canadian retailers.

An announcement showed up on the CRA website yesterday, announcing an extension to May 6 – for e-Filers only (I am linking to a CBC News page because CRA’s home page is so bogged down, we don’t need to contribute to their trouble).

I was doing some business research on CRA’s website yesterday and noticed painfully slow response times. I’m waiting for someone to comment that CRA should blame their ISP for traffic shaping.

It certainly raises questions about CRA’s web architecture when even information pages can’t be reached.

In an article analysing the impact of the new spectrum auction rules on Rogers, Forbes seems to completely misunderstand what is up for grabs in the upcoming Canadian spectrum auction.

Forbes says:

Shares of Rogers plunged on Thursday after a Canadian government agency issued new auction rules that will boost competition in the cable and Internet service industry.

Boosting competition in cable and internet? Shares in Rogers fell, but it should not have been due to future cable and internet competition.

In Canada, potential new entrants will have the best opportunity to win 40 MHz of spectrum (broken up into a 20 MHz slice and two 10 MHz slices) to establish a new mobile wireless carrier.

No wonder John Henderson of Scotia Capital says (in the same article):

The market is overreacting… The auction will have very little impact for the next two years.

This auction is about mobile wireless. While other social and environmental factors may be at play for TV and internet, the auction rules should have no impact whatsoever on cable and internet.

I mentioned that I saw Dave Caputo last week at the Scotia Capital investor event.

When we spoke, Dave reminded me that Sandvine wrote a white paper nearly 3 years ago – long before many of us had even heard the term Net Neutrality, let alone formed an opinion about it.

The white paper provides a different perspective on the term, suggesting that carrier management of traffic ensures true network neutrality by means of fair allocation of limited network resources between potentially competing uses of the network. The paper speaks of the Tragedy of the Commons.

When too many owners are endowed with the privilege to use a given resource, the resource is prone to overuse and eventual depletion or destruction.

Individual subscribers are concerned about maximizing their own personal utility of the broadband service. There is no incentive for the subscriber to moderate their use of the network without some form of feedback via the service plan definition, cost, structure and enforcement.

Of course, Sandvine provides tools to network operators that provide visibility into the traffic, enabling them to control the allocation of ‘common’ resources between subscribers, applications, and content providers. The objective is to maximize the utility of the network.

I attended the Scotia Capital Telecom and Tech Conference yesterday and heard some interesting interviews with a variety of industry leaders – 4 of whom were speakers at The Canadian Telecom Summit last June.

Pierre Blouin, CEO of MTS Allstream, had a notable observation about bundles. In his view, telephony, TV and internet increasingly are seen by consumers as a single product. Mobile wireless is a separate, more personal product. The other 3 are more than a bundle; they are a complete household communications suite.

Speaking over the distraction of an annoying (false) fire alarm, Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM, gushed about the upside potential represented by UMA (unlicensed mobile access) and FMC (fixed mobile convergence). He sees these capabilities as a threat to traditional wireline telephony but an opportunity for wireless carriers. WiFi simply won’t have the hand-off capabilities or the back-haul, so the wide area networks of the cellular carriers will be the glue to hold it all together.

The added benefit, which was also mentioned by Nadir Mohamed of Rogers, is the ability to off-load some of the data traffic from the carrier networks, easing pressure on capital resources.

The fourth Telecom Summit alumnus was Dave Caputo of Sandvine who presented some fascinating data about the internet traffic impact of Halo 3 it was released in September. Gaming traffic on ISP networks shot up five-fold, but there were virtually no new households added. So, while Microsoft enjoyed a spectacular opening day revenues, ISPs carried the significant increase in traffic without a measurable, let alone commensurate, contribution to their top line.

Pierre and Nadir are already confirmed to return as keynote speakers at The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit.

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MTS Allstream, RIM, Rogers, Sandvine, Halo 3, Canadian Telecom Summit