Search Results for: literacy

In the wake of the World Cup finals driving enormous streaming video across the globe’s internet backbones, Canada is receiving the final submissions for its Digital Economy consultation.

There was a last minute extension granted that pushed the deadline to tonight at midnight. As an aside, there was a bit of ambiguity on what exactly was meant by “The deadline for ideas and submissions on Canada’s digital economy strategy has been extended until midnight, Tuesday, July 13.” After all, with all of the time zones we have in Canada, the time midnight varies. For that matter, the time “midnight” occurs twice each day: at 00:00 and at 24:00. Which was meant? Even the countdown timer was confused, showing 2 days remaining all day on both Sunday and Monday. It seemed humourous that a digital strategy consultation specified an imprecise analog time, rather than a universally understood specific digital time.

But I digress.

The last minute extension meant that some submissions are available early. I had a chance to skim through some, including a few that indicate that Canada’s infrastructure is doing pretty well; our adoption needs attention.

Which brings me back to the World Cup. Just as we Canadians experienced for the Vancouver Olympics this past winter, the World Cup drove spectacular levels of broadband usage on a global scale. Some of the more impressive statistics from Rogers were: More than 75,000 fans signed up to Rogers On Demand Online (RODO) to be able to watch matches streamed live; through last Friday, almost 225,000 hours of FIFA action was watched on RODO; more than 10% of the matches viewed were in a language other than English; nearly 10,000 fans downloaded a Rogers On Demand Mobile app, letting them watch live on their smartphones. According to an article in the National Post this past weekend, when Sidney Crosby scored the goal that earned Canada’s gold medal in hockey, “a torrent of texts, streaming video and other data requests” flooded Bell’s mobile network.

Use of technology increases when people see the value of (or at least they apply a value to) the technical capability. The assumption is that we are helping educate a new group of users among those who watched the Olympics on-line or streamed World Cup action to their computer or smart phone.

Step by step, event by event, we are increasing Canada’s digital literacy. Increasing broadband adoption will require increased engagement by people who haven’t been able to find enough value to justify the effort and cost of going on-line – up until now.

The ITU has released its latest report on the state of the information society around the world [pdf, 4.28MB].

There is a lot of information in there to be digested, but for now, let me highlight a couple observations.

The first point that I found interesting was a table in Annex 3, that is the basis for computing the IDI – defined as the ICT Development Index. In passing, allow me to applaud the ITU for its use of a SRT: a Secondary Recursive TLA: a rarely used three letter acronym that embeds a second TLA within it.

In that Annex 3 table, we can see that in 2008, Canada had computers in 80% of our households and broadband in 75.1% of the households. Assuming that households with computers would be the only ones that would subscribe to broadband service, it appears that close to 94% of Canadian households with computers had broadband service. As a comparison, Sweden has 87% of households equipped with computers, 84% with broadband. It seems to me that ensuring computer accessibility, through increased digital literacy and affordability, is one of the things that needs to be looked at when we try to increase broadband penetration.

Section 2 of the report has a couple important text boxes that speak about the challenges of international data comparisons. Box 2.1 talks about the importance of shifting to household survey data, using mobile penetration as an example of the distortions created by use of supply side data from operators.

Box 2.3 looks at specific limitations of international data comparisons, looking at the Korean and Japanese cases as examples.

‘International Internet bandwidth per user’ is another indicator where the performance of the Republic of Korea is relatively weak (ranked 58th globally). International bandwidth is low since Korean Internet users rely mainly on national bandwidth, available abundantly and at relatively low cost. Koreans have produced a large amount of national Internet content in local language and surf ‘at home’ (on web sites that are hosted within the country, not abroad), in their local language. The top twenty most popular Korean websites are all hosted in Korea. Few Koreans visit websites abroad due to language constraints.

The box doesn’t mention the anomaly for Korea with computer penetration (80.9%), yet 94.3% of households are reported as having broadband. Interesting?

Canada’s international bandwidth is most certainly understated since there is no mechanism by which cross-border connections can accurately be counted. In addition, to what extent do domestic sites satisfy the needs of francophones, similar to Korea’s domestic content producers.

As the ITU report itself cautions:

These data issues make international comparisons difficult and prevent policy makers from truly assessing the development of the information society.

There is no substitute for applying critical thought to any set of simple metrics.

Digital issues will be covered with lots of critical thought at at The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit. Have you registered yet?

The FCC offered a handy guide to its National Broadband Plan [pdf, 11.5MB, 376 pages] by way of a series of tweets. For your handy reference, here is what they said about each chapter, with links to the online version of each chapter:

• Chapter 1: It is time to connect America anew. Broadband is today’s great infrastructure challenge. We seek access for all
• Chapter 2: Goals: 100m homes w/ 100mbps; lead in mobile; affordable access; civic 1gbps; public safety network; lead in energy
• Chapter 3: Ecosystem is a cycle: apps & content drive devices drive network services. Many strong points, but can do better
• Chapter 4: Spur competition with spectrum release. Empower consumers with broadband performance labeling, like nutrition info
• Chapter 5: Spectrum: the great enabler. For mobile the need is unmistakable. Think 10 years ahead. Reform allocation system
• Chapter 6: Providers build networks on public lands. Improve utilization of existing infrastructure. Foster further deployment
• Chapter 7: Invest in R&D, long & short term. Use tax credits. Fund 1 Gbps testbeds on military bases. Urge experimentation
• Chapter 8: 2020 universalization target: 4mbps actual. Review every 4 years. Improve USF, form Connect America & Mobility Fund
• Chapter 9: Adoption:Pursue affordability. Consider free wireless. Launch Digital Literacy Corps. Make Web relevant, accessible
• Chapter 10: Healthcare: Incentivize e-care. Get better data & give patients control over it. Get centers connected
• Chapter 11: Education:Develop, broaden online learning; open content. Make use of data. Bolster e-rate for schools & libraries
• Chapter 12: Energy: Integrate broadband into the Smart Grid. Provide access to digital data; will result in lower consumption
• Chapter 13: Economic Opportunity: Small businesses should harness the Web. Promote virtual job training & placement, telework
• Chapter 14: Government Performance: Improve service delivery. Prioritize efficiency. Use government as a broadband anchor
• Chapter 15: Civic Engagement: Advance an open & transparent government. Utilize social media. Innovate. Modernize democracy
• Chapter 16: Public Safety: Create a public safety wireless network. Ensure cyber security. Roll out next-gen 911 and alerts
• Chapter 17: Plan will always be in beta. Establish a Strategy Council, a timetable for proceedings and a Performance Dashboard

More tomorrow – including relevance to Canada.

The FCC has been trickling out information about the contents of its National Broadband Plan over the past few weeks. Earlier today, it released the 6 page executive summary [pdf, 888 KB]. The report is scheduled for release Tuesday.

During a number of the consultation sessions, I got the impression that many of the speakers were confusing access to broadband with access to basic connectivity. For example, during the small business session, some speakers talked about benefits of having a website or a web storefront, neither of which need broadband at all. You want to make sure your web host is powerfully connected to multiple networks, but that doesn’t require a lot of power in the umbilical to the ‘net. 

In reading the goals in the Executive Summary, I was disappointed that one of the 6 items to be tracked “as a compass” over the next decade is:

To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption.

Why do we need broadband for this? Isn’t this a low bandwidth application? How many bits per second do you think it takes to tell you about your water, electricity and natural gas flow? How many bits do you think it takes to send a message to dial down the air conditioner or turn off the water? I was able to do this with a Radio Shack X-10 system and a touch tone phone nearly 30 years ago. Maybe I am confused.

Once the FCC realized that home health care won’t justify 100Mbps service, the regulator must have been looking for some other application that would appeal to the Democratic agenda. After all, how many of us are going to buy a Binford 9000 MRI machine to generate the high resolution images to transmit to Radiologists-R-Us for diagnosis? Instead, let’s set a goal to enable all Americans to have remote access to watching the meters on the side of their house – in high definition, no less! Of course, as I wrote before, earlier FCC consultations were equally modest in saying that broadband enables the IRS to save money with e-filing of tax returns, another low bitrate application.

This isn’t the only place that the Executive Summary fails to inspire. The FCC has set a bold vision for bringing affordable 100 Mbps service to 100 M households, the majority of American households. But for the rest of America, the plan falls short. Over the next 10 years, the FCC wants to have 4 Mbps service universally available. That’s it. 4 Mbps to the hinterlands after another decade of subsidy.

There is much to applaud from what is rumoured to be in the FCC’s plan to be released tomorrow. For example, it is encouraging to see the drive to improve digital literacy.

Maybe the executive summary doesn’t do the plan justice. I hope to find greater inspiration in the full document.

On Tuesday June 8, The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit will be featuring panels looking at International Perspectives on ICT Strategies and progress on the development of Canada’s National Digital strategy.

Have you registered yet?

On Monday, Ontario’s Speech from the Throne set out the agenda for Premier Dalton McGuinty’s government. Interestingly, what was called the “Open Ontario Plan” did not lay out plans for an open government, for open access to digital files or records.

Ontario set out plans for expansion of post-secondary education, promising to add 20,000 university seats and creation of an on-line institute.

Ontario’s colleges and universities will also play a key role in the five-year Open Ontario Plan, starting with the addition of 20,000 students this year. The plan also targets e-learning with a new Ontario Online Institute, which will give students access to the best professors in top university programs from their home computers.

Of course, this presumes that the students have homes and computers to start with. We have seen programs such as Toonies for Tummies asking us to help disadvantaged children have access to a proper meal.

There wasn’t a lot of discussion of digital economy issues, perhaps because the province assumes that communications falls under the sole purview of the federal government. However, there are many areas of government impact that fall under provincial jurisdiction.

How can provincial governments drive broadband adoption? I was listening to a Digital Inclusion Summit conducted by the FCC yesterday. One of the best speakers was Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, who commented that the destiny of a child can be predetermined based on their zip code.

With broadband, a child’s ability to learn is not limited solely by where their school is located.

To what extent are we doing enough to look at this problem in Canada? As mentioned yesterday by HUD Secretary Donovan:

Federally-assisted housing offers a platform to reduce these barriers through local outreach and training that educates people on specific ways that technology can improve their lives, and on how to use it. Through digital literacy training to get people comfortable with technology. And through workforce development and financial literacy training so that they can get the most out of it.

The US National Broadband Plan, to be released next week, will be looking at how to bring down the cost of computers and monthly broadband service fees for low-income families who lack the opportunities to make use of digital technologies.

Broadband stimulus programs in Canada have typically been aimed at supply; isn’t it time to focus on elements that improve accessibility and demand?