Search Results for: affordable

I was recently pointed to a speech last month by New York governor Eliot Spitzer to the New York State Farm Bureau Annual Meeting in Niagara Falls, where he launched a campaign for universal broadband service for all of NY.

When many of us think of NY, we think of one of the most densely populated parts of the planet. We think of advanced communications driving Wall Street, forgetting that there is a lot of territory upstate.

A drive from Buffalo to Albany can look similar to driving from Toronto to Sudbury – albeit with way fewer Tim Horton’s locations and no Canadian Tire stores.

Governor Spitzer said that his state has inadequate infrastructure for the Information Age.

In fact, fewer than 25 percent of New Yorkers in rural areas have access to broadband Internet. Some may assume that because these areas are rural, they have natural and unavoidable disadvantages. But a rural landscape has not stopped Canada, a mostly rural country, from maintaining a broadband penetration rate of over 50 percent.

This problem does not only affect Upstate. Downstate doesn’t fare much better. Nearly two-thirds of people living in New York City lack access to affordable, high-speed broadband.

He blames the US federal government for a lack of leadership – the absence of a national broadband strategy.

So the governor has set his own objectives:

Our goals are—by the year 2015—for every citizen of New York to have access to at least 20 megabits per second in each direction, and 100 megabits per second in major metropolitan areas.

Despite Canada being cited as ahead of New York, will broadband be an issue in Canadian politics? How will we ensure that in 2015, Canada will still be seen as a leader by our neighbours?

Technorati Tags:
Eliot Spitzer, broadband

Yak had a witness at the CRTC’s Essential Services proceeding this morning. He was asked if there was evidence of the impact of dial around in disciplining telco long distance rates.

I have access to virtually unlimited North American calling on various lines in the house. However, anyone who makes any amount of international calling is crazy if they don’t use a dial-around service. For international calling, all service providers are on an equal footing – even the major phone companies are just resellers of international long distance.

So why are dial around companies so much cheaper?

As I have pointed out before, in many cases, dial around is even cheaper than Skype. No prepayment. No need to run out to a convenience store to buy a card. No expiration date. No ‘system access fee’. You just pick up the phone and dial and the charge appears on your bill.

Some people may only make one call per month, if that. But the savings can be dramatic. Dial around provides an important level of flexibility for people swayed to lock into domestic services bundles.

Will the CRTC keeps casual calling viable? In a country like Canada that has such a high percentage of people making occasional international calls, dial around provides affordable choice.

Whazzup with the fact-checking in recent editorials on wireless services?

It started with last week’s Montreal Gazette editorial and then moved out to the Vancouver Sun. On Monday, the Ottawa Citizen jumped on the bandwagon, substituting hyperbole for facts in expressing its opinion on wireless services.

Last week, I dared to point out that the Gazette ignored facts that didn’t agree with its agenda. The Citizen went beyond that stage and just got its facts wrong.

One paragraph was particularly insulting to the software and hardware developers that call Canada home:

Nobody with a cutting-edge product to sell wants to set up someplace where mobile phone and data connections are second-rate and cripplingly expensive, particularly if they’re in the information-age industries we prize so highly, any more than you’d build a factory in a place with no roads or rail.

Are they really suggesting that Canada doesn’t offer opportunities for communications research and development? Has the Citizen not looked out the window into the nature of industries set up in its own backyard? There are at least a couple people in the National Capital Region who draw paychecks from companies developing cutting edge products, including multi-national firms that could easily relocate elsewhere.

Outside the city of dreams (as a former boss of mine used to call Ottawa), companies like Ericsson continue to expand their Canadian presence. Hundreds of entrepreneurs continue to innovate in companies located in every corner of the country.

What exactly did the Citizen mean by ‘nobody’? Is the Citizen suggesting that none of them want to set up in Ottawa, let alone anywhere else in Canada?

Another point. With the OECD having just released its annual communications review, why would the Citizen look at the 2003 report – and misquote it at that?

According to 2003 figures from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Canada lagged all other member countries in mobile-phone use with about 40-per-cent adoption; most other OECD countries were at 80 per cent or above.

Besides the fact that the cited figures are 3 years out of date, the numbers refer to mobile phone penetration, not mobile phone use. Fact is, Canadians are among the world’s biggest users of their mobile phones. Can we possibly deduce that, despite all of us wanting lower mobile rates, the pricing may be affordable?

Let’s look at the paragraph that creatively calls CDMA the cellular equivalent of Betamax – I actually think that is a clever metaphor, but the Citizen wasn’t satisfied with leaving it at that. Instead, it proclaimed:

a lack of interoperability with foreign providers makes life difficult for Canadians wanting to take their mobiles abroad, and for foreigners visiting Canada on business.

I don’t believe it. Bell and TELUS both offer a number of devices, including the latest Blackberry, that provide global roaming capabilities. Help me understand how foreign business people have been disadvantaged visiting Canada, just because we only have one GSM company? Is there any research to back this up, or is this another anecdotal tale being repeated to create an image of truth.

Canadians need to have an intelligent debate of the issues in respect of the upcoming spectrum auction. There are good arguments on both sides of the issue. Better decisions are a logical outcome when there is a vibrant discussion of important issues. But can we agree to at least consider the facts?

We deserve more accurate information from our newspapers in presenting support for their arguments.

The Montreal Gazette ran an editorial yesterday entitled “Canada’s wireless policy is clueless“. It left me scratching my head.

The article was based on a superficial assessment of the wireless market in Canada, ignoring facts that didn’t agree with its agenda. I had to wonder about the lack of depth in researching its position.

Take for example the paragraph bemoaning Canadian cell-phone penetration:

About 58 per cent of Canadians now have cellphones; in the U.S. the figure is 77 per cent and Britain, the Czech Republic, and several other European countries have more than one such device per person.

Let me be perfectly clear. “More than one such device per person” makes no rational sense. It is a statistic driven by customers arbitraging aberrant pricing plans. Canada should not strive to have disfunctional European pricing models that lead to supra-normal penetration rates. The Gazette apparently thinks that it is good to have multiple phones so that when you call someone on the Bell network, you use a Bell phone; have another phone for your Rogers-based friends and a third for TELUS calls. That is one of the phenomena that drives European penetration in excess of 100%. People holding onto foreign country pre-paid SIM cards is another contributor.

Europeans typically receive no subsidy for their phones. Would the Gazette also want each of us to pay upwards of $150 more for our phones as well?

As the old commercial use to say, “you can pay me now, or pay me later.” Canadians like to pay later. We also like to be able to call local numbers for free from our home phones. Europeans get gouged.

With multiple phones per person, Europeans are also paying multiple bills per user – paying more for the privilege of claiming superior penetration rates over those of us in the colonies.

Here is another juicy paragraph from the Gazette editorial:

As the well-informed University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist explains on the opposite page, lack of competition in the mobile-data business means prices are high, which is keeping Canadians off the newer sections of the information superhighway. Hardly anybody in Canada would be able to afford the mobile Internet service provided by the iPhone, and certain other handheld devices – because all of Canada’s service providers keep their mobile data rates sky-high.

As I have written before, blaming high data plan pricing for the delay in iPhone’s launch is just not credible. The iPhone hasn’t been launched in Germany or any country other than the US. Other countries are said to have better suited data prices; their markets are bigger. But no iPhone. Why is that?

Could it be that Apple is rolling out the product on their own schedule?

Canadians continue to buy the latest versions of Blackberry. Carriers have introduced special plans for Mobile TV that don’t charge by the bit. Canadians are continuing to buy wireless services for the first time increasing our penetration rates, and add new enhanced multi-media features which speaks louder to affordable prices than repeated rantings from opinion pieces in papers.

Rogers’ launched its Vision service in April, beating any of the US carriers to market with truly advanced high speed mobile internet. Barrett Xplore has made broadband internet universally available to every household and business in Canada, coast-to-coast, sea-to-sea-to-frozen tundra.

It seems to me that The Gazette should get better informed before calling Canada’s wireless policy clueless.

---

Let me again point out the OpEd by FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell has an Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on July 24, called Broadband Baloney. He refutes the tendency for people to want government intervention in communications markets that are working pretty well on their own:

Looming over the horizon are heavy-handed government mandates setting arbitrary standards, speeds and build-out requirements that could favor some technologies over others, raise prices and degrade service. This would be a mistaken road to take — although it would hardly be the first time in history that alarmists have ignored cold, hard facts in pursuit of bad policy.

As I wrote on Tuesday, his piece concludes:

When it comes to broadband policy, let’s put aside flawed studies and rankings, and reject the road of regulatory stagnation. In the next few years, we will witness a tremendous explosion of entrepreneurial brilliance in the broadband market, if the government doesn’t micromanage. Belief in entrepreneurs and a light regulatory touch is the right broadband policy for America.

Sasktel has announced that it is appealing parts of the CRTC’s Price Cap Decision (2007-27), dealing with mandated price increases in ‘high cost serving areas’:

We believe the part of the CRTC’s recent Price Cap Decision that systematically reduces the amount of subsidy SaskTel receives to support residential service in high cost serving areas was not within the original scope of the proceeding. This decision essentially forces SaskTel to raise rates in high cost serving areas. We want to continue providing our customers in high cost serving areas with affordable phone service but this decision ultimately ties our hands, therefore, we feel strongly that the CRTC should re-evaluate and conduct a separate hearing to deal with this issue.

The appeal is based on procedural grounds, with SaskTel asserting that the issue was not part of the original scope of the proceeding and therefore the CRTC did not solicit sufficient evidence upon which to base its determination.

SaskTel is a provincial crown corporation. A reduction in transfer payments to rural operators (such as SaskTel) from other carriers is a resultant effect of the Price Cap determination to raise rates in high cost serving areas.

---

Update [July 13, 12:35 pm]
The appeal is in the form of a Review and Vary application back to the CRTC, asking it to review its own decision.