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The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association announced it is rebranding itself, dropping the ‘wireless’ qualifier, explicitly expanding its scope to include wireline communications. Its new Twitter tagline reads “Dedicated to building a better future for Canadians through connectivity”.

Welcome to the Canadian Telecommunications Association, a new name reflecting the organization’s broadened role. The Association promotes the “importance of both wireless and wireline telecommunications to Canada’s economic growth and social development, and the crucial role of ongoing investments by facilities-based service providers in delivering world-class internet and mobile-wireless services to Canadians.”

The rebranding represents the latest chapter in a nearly 50-year history for the organization. In many ways, the evolution of the Association’s name and branding over the decades reflects the changing nature of telecommunications in Canada. The association says it will continue to do more than advocate on behalf of its industry members. It facilitates industry-wide initiatives such as the Mobile Giving Foundation Canada, Canadian Common Short Codes, STAC and wirelessaccessibility.ca.

Technology evolution and consumer demands tend to blur lines between the capabilities and use of wired and wireless telecommunications. Many policy priorities overlap between wireline and wireless carriers.

“We remain dedicated to building a better future for Canadians through both wireline and wireless connectivity.”

Consumers want faster, more reliable internet connections, driven by streaming video and other bandwidth-intensive applications. So, service providers invest billions of dollars each year to expand and upgrade access and transport networks.

Canadian Telecommunications Association CEO Robert Ghiz said: “Our members are committed to ensuring that Canadians continue to enjoy world-class telecommunications services that are the cornerstone of Canada’s digital economy and an important contributor to the social fabric of our country. For this to happen, Canada must maintain a regulatory environment that incentivizes the high-level of private sector investment needed to connect all Canadians and build the next generation of connectivity infrastructure and services.”

“Canada’s future depends of connectivity” is a phrase that has appeared many times on these pages since it was used by former ISED Minister Navdeep Bains in August 2020.

The rebranding recognizes that connectivity can be delivered over wireline and wireless facilities, building digital infrastructure for a new era.

Canada’s innovation-based economy depends on connectivity – connectivity delivered by the investments made by members of the Canadian Telecommunications Association.

The Canadian Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (CSTAC) released a report aimed at improving network resilience and reliability.

“Telecommunications Network Resiliency in Canada: A Path Forward” [pdf, 474KB] contains guidance for telecommunications services providers, not obligations. The report says, “recommendations contained in this document are neither directive nor mandatory.”

The report was prepared by the Canadian Telecommunications Network Resiliency Working Group (CTNR-WG). CTNR-WG represents 12 of Canada’s largest telecommunications services providers, including mobile carriers, telephone companies, cable companies and satellite services, with companies that cover urban and rural, business and consumer markets. The recommendations include items that address last July’s national network failure and the impact of Hurricane Fiona last September on networks in Atlantic Canada.

General Recommendations:

1. Seek to establish redundant pathways, in particular, facilities that support main fiber access should have physically diverse fiber routes between critical infrastructures, especially those routes with access to emergency services such as 911.
2. Attempt to identify and mitigate single points of failure and strive for geographic diversity of services and network elements. Where essential equipment is co-located, priority should be given to physical separation, such as a fire break, to reduce the possibility of common mode failure.
3. Design physical structures (both indoor and outdoor) to be as resilient as practicable, in the circumstances, to withstand extreme environmental conditions and weather events (e.g., wildfires, floods, windstorms, ice, etc.), as well as the loss of commercial utility (e.g. hydroelectric) power supplies. Further, CTSPs should strive to source their equipment and systems from reliable, capable, and reputable suppliers.
4. Strive to install communications cables underground to mitigate damage from possible structural degradation and/or natural disasters. Should communications cables be buried, known risks attributed to this design should be documented and mitigated to the extent practicable.
5. Endeavor to establish robust business practices that enable rapid assessment of network issues, along with service continuity plans that support strong communication and responsiveness when adverse events cause major outages to critical services.

The report also includes recommendations for certain government actions to help improve network resilience. First in that list is one that highlights the growing impact of vandalism and theft of critical infrastructure, such as the theft of copper cable.

Asks of the Government of Canada:

1. Create an article of federal law that specifically protects CTSPs’ critical and ancillary infrastructure and maximizes criminal penalties in the event of willful or negligent damage to, and/or acts of vandalism or theft of critical network infrastructure. As a reference, the US Criminal Code criminalizes such acts through financial penalties, imprisonment, or both. CTSPs will endeavour to provide data to ISED on a strictly confidential basis that could include information such as (but not specific to or limited to) the type of damage (e.g., a fiber cut) and/or the relevant details.
2. Implement a timely approval process by ISED for short-term emergency spectrum sharing in the event of a severe network outage, when it is jointly requested by the CTSPs involved. Such a process could be helpful when a “Triggering Event Declaration” is made under the September 9,2022 Memorandum of Understanding but also in other emergency circumstances which may not qualify as or rise to the level of a Triggering Event.
3. Liaise with provincial and territorial governments with a view to enhancing measures to enforce compliance with existing regulations related to “Dial Before You Dig” legislation or other similar underground infrastructure notification regulations, in order to minimize any potential damage to underground telecom facilities resulting from non-compliant or careless excavation practices.
4. Liaise with the telecom and electricity / hydro sector participants, including the Canadian Standards Association (CSA), to collaborate on improving critical infrastructure resiliency through changes to the Canadian Electrical Code or other construction standards.
5. Facilitate network construction and reliability access to public places and publicly owned passive infrastructure. Specifically, through amendments to the Telecommunications Act and Radiocommunication Act:
   1. Expand the CRTC’s authority over publicly-owned passive infrastructure to clearly include access to all public property capable of supporting [network] facilities, such as street furniture.
   2. Assert federal jurisdiction in the wireless tower siting and develop new site approval processes that avoid unnecessary delay and burden and expedite the delivery of wireless services to Canadians.
   3. Expand the scope of the CRTC’s authority over support structures to include CTSPs access to the support structures of provincially regulated utilities. 
6. Telecommunications networks are critical infrastructure that, while federally regulated, are highly dependent on provincial/territorial regulated utilities and services. The CTNR-WG asks that the federal government coordinate the following amongst both federal and provincial / territorial emergency management organizations:
   1. Priority access, at all times (including during emergencies) for CTSP technicians to their sites to effect repairs and fuel generators;
   2. Priority access for CTSPs to fuels during recovery efforts following major emergencies and consider reliable / resilient fuel dispensaries; and
   3. Priority restoration of utility power to CTSP sites by provincial / territorial utility companies.
7. Exemption from labour regulations and legislation that is fundamentally inconsistent with the Minister’s prioritization of network resiliency – specifically the legislation prohibiting the use of replacement workers, which, if applied to CTSPs, could result in outages during work stoppages and Hours of Work limitations under Part III of the Labour Code in the contexts of emergencies, which would limit the ability of CTSPs to respond to outages.
8. In regions where there is no wireless coverage, or where there exists service from only one CTSP, the federal government should provide funding or tax credits to bolster that CTSPs’ reliability. This will support the CTSP in supplying backup batteries, generators, diverse backhaul investments, etc.
9. Encourage and liaise with provincial, territorial and municipal governments to ensure that local processes support accelerated tower construction and other radio apparatus siting approval times.

There are more than 100 detailed recommendations to improve network resilience for telecom services providers to implement “to the extent commercially, operationally, technically and physically practicable”.

We’ll certainly be following these issues. But let me pause for a little story.

With all the best preparations in the world, networks will still sometimes go down. Just over a week ago, we saw the CRTC itself experienced a weather related outage:

When the Rogers network went down last July, I observed that it wasn’t even the worst outage that week: “KDDI, Japan’s number 2 carrier, had 40 million customers without service for 3 days.”

Thirty-two years ago, I attended TELECOM 91 in Geneva, a global gathering and trade show for industry professionals and government authorities. Together with my company CEO, we were being given a tour of the multi-storey Digital Equipment Corporation booth by the president of the company’s Canadian arm. He proudly stated that 100% of Digital’s Canadian communications network was on our company’s facilities. I responded by saying in that case, he should probably fire his IT manager. My CEO nearly swallowed his cigar.

Imagine if Canada’s Interac bank network had been built with multiple suppliers of services.

Instead of expecting that networks will never fail, network professionals have plans in place to manage and mitigate various risks of failure. Most of the time, network events aren’t noticed by customers because backup plans are invoked within milliseconds.

Every so often, something new comes along to test the networks and the advance planning. The Canadian Telecommunications Network Resiliency Working Group is working to minimize the customer impact of those events.

Do screens make teens lonely? A recent article by Noah Smith got me thinking about the impact of so much screen time on our kids.

In “Honestly, it’s probably the phones”, Smith argues that the smartphone is the most plausible explanation for teenage unhappiness.

Doesn’t having access to all of their friends and acquaintances at all times via a device in their pockets mean that kids are less isolated than before?

Well, no. As the natural experiment of the pandemic demonstrated, physical interaction is important. Text is a highly attenuated medium — it’s slow and cumbersome, and an ocean of nuance and tone and emotion is lost. Even video chat is a highly incomplete substitute for physical interaction. A phone doesn’t allow you to experience the nearby physical presence of another living, breathing body — something that we spent untold eons evolving to be accustomed to. And of course that’s even before mentioning activities like sex that are far better when physical contact is involved.

He goes on to say that there is nothing about smartphone ownership that forces users to stop getting together in person. But, he provides several reasons why smartphones reduce the incentives:

• Distraction — “the rise of smartphones was also the rise of “phubbing”, i.e. when people go on their phones instead of paying attention to the people around them”
• Behavioral ease — “when your phone is right there in your pocket, it’s easier to just text a friend instead of going and hanging out”
• Network effect – “If 20% of people would rather be on their phones, that reduces everyone else’s options for in-person hangouts by 20%.”

Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University wrote an article in 2019, “Teens have less face time with their friends – and are lonelier than ever”.

“It turns out that today’s teens are socializing with friends in fundamentally different ways – and also happen to be the loneliest generation on record.”

Written before the impact of the pandemic, Professor Twenge observed, “Today’s 10th-graders go to about 17 fewer parties a year than 10th-graders in the 1980s did. Overall, 12th-graders now spend an hour less on in-person social interaction on an average day than their Gen X predecessors did.”

The study found that as the decline in “face-to-face time” accelerated after 2010, feelings of loneliness among teens increased dramatically. At the same time, research has found that teens who spend more time on social media also spend more time with friends in person. That should lead us to wonder why in-person social interactions have been going down, while social media use has increased.

The social teens are still more likely to meet up in person, and they’re also more active on their accounts. However, the total number of in-person hangs for everyone in the group drops as social media replaces some face-to-face time.

So the decline in face-to-face interaction among teens isn’t just an individual issue; it’s a generational one. Even teens who eschew social media are affected: Who will hang out with them when most of their peers are alone in their bedrooms scrolling through Instagram?

This study was published in March of 2019, a year before the world transitioned to a period of virtual social interaction.

In the face of a possibility that smartphones are behind the rise in teen unhappiness, Noah Smith suggests that our best move may be to simply wait for society to adapt to the changes effected by social media.

Perhaps that is the most pragmatic approach. Collectively, we aren’t going to put the smartphone genie back in the bottle.

Still, these articles should serve as important warning flags for parents, teachers and all those concerned about the mental well-being of a generation raised on always-on connected devices.

Some have argued that teens are simply choosing to communicate with their friends in a different way, so the shift toward electronic communication isn’t concerning.

That argument assumes that electronic communication is just as good for assuaging loneliness and depression as face-to-face interaction. It seems clear that this isn’t the case. There’s something about being around another person – about touch, about eye contact, about laughter – that can’t be replaced by digital communication.

The result is a generation of teens who are lonelier than ever before.

I ran across the DIRT Report [pdf, 4.7 MB] last week. DIRT stands for “Damage Information Reporting Tool” and it is produced by the Common Ground Alliance (CGA), an association of companies that engage in underground construction. In other words, CGA members dig up dirt.

How does this relate to telecom? Well, when CGA members are digging, they want to dig up dirt, not buried infrastructure that gets in their way, infrastructure such as natural gas pipelines, water and sewer lines, electrical wires, or telecom cables and fibre.

For years, we have been trying to teach people to “Call Before You Dig” to arrange free locate services. In Ontario, the service bureau is “Ontario One Call”. Different areas may have different points of contact, but as a matter of general practice, if you contact any local electric, phone or gas company, they will put you in touch with the single number or website to arrange for all the underground services to be marked BEFORE you start digging.

CGA has an interactive version of its DIRT report that allows easy examination of data by province or state.

The report shows that overall, about a quarter of all damage is caused by work being done without people calling first. Despite all the work to build awareness, three out of five times, it is professional excavators at fault for not calling, not home gardeners.

I looked at the report and isolated Canadian telecom. In 2021 (the latest year reported), there were 4,255 damage reports, down 240 from 2020 (4,495), and more than 10% less than 2019 (4,840). About 5% (222) were caused by the occupants. More than half (2,375) were on the customer drops, about a third (1,436) were damage to distribution facilities, and just over 1% (55) were reported damage to transmission lines. Keep in mind that damage to transmission lines can impact a far larger number of customers.

When I looked at damage to natural gas and propane lines, in Canada there were 2,197 in 2021, of which around 20% were caused by the occupants. Apparently, professional contractors dig up gas lines even when there is a risk of blowing themselves up.

Frequent readers know that I have always had a special level of respect for the people who actually build and maintain our telecom networks, doing the physical work constructing, maintaining and repairing outside plant: towers, antennas, plowing and drilling for cables and fibre, installing and climbing poles.

That is a good segue to remind you that STAC2023, the annual gathering of the Structure, Tower and Antenna Council, is coming up in just 7 weeks, March 28-29, 2023. It will be held in person this year, at the Niagara Falls Convention Centre. Each year, this event is dedicated to safety and other best practices in the communications tower industry, bringing together industry professionals from across Canada.

Have you booked your place yet?

The application period has opened for The 2023 Women of STAC Bursary Fund [application pdf].

In relation to last year’s bursary fund, I wrote “Creating A Better Reflection”, talking about how I learned the importance of diversity and inclusion early on in my career, nearly 40 years ago at Bell Labs in New Jersey. I wrote about programs we had where we would to go into inner city schools to stimulate interest in math and science from non-traditional communities. Our objective was to try to increase the number of young kids who might pursue those disciplines in high school and in university. Ultimately, the objective was to have a pool of candidate employees that were a better reflection of the markets we served. “We were playing the long game.”

In September, I wrote “Training The Next Generation Of Tower Technicians”, looking at efforts by the Structure, Tower and Antenna Council (STAC) to train the next generation of telecommunications tower technicians, supporting the growing need for wireless
connectivity.

The Women Of STAC is a subcommittee of the Council with a vision to encourage and support women in their pursuit of career advancement in the telecommunications and related industries in Canada. The committee works to identify areas where there are training, mentoring, and networking gaps and opportunities for the career advancement of women working in the telecommunications industry in Canada.

To that end, the Women of STAC offers a bursary, providing financial support to enable the pursuit of training, professional development, or academic programs for women in the telecommunications field. The fund is supported this year through financial contributions from Technostrobe, Varcon, WesTower, and the CWTA.

In addition to monetary support, the bursary recipients receive an invitation to participate at the annual STAC Conference (taking place March 28-29, 2023 in Niagara Falls), to gain valuable learning and networking opportunities with STAC members.

Applications must be received by February 27, 2023. For more information, send an email to info@stacouncil.ca.