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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States has released information on wireless substitution, based on early data from its most recent National Health Interview Survey.

What is interesting?

Let’s start with the source of the study – a national health study that generates the data from in-person interviews. From June through December 2006, household telephone status information was obtained for 13,056 households in the United States.

Why is CDC concerned about wireless substitution? Because most major survey research organizations, including the National Center for Health Statistics, do not include wireless telephone numbers when conducting telephone surveys.

Let’s look at some of the numbers.

• more than one in eight American homes (12.8%) only had wireless telephones during the second half of 2006;
• 11.6% of all children—8.5 million children—lived in wireless-only households;
• approximately 2.2% of households had neither wireless nor landline service.

It gets especially interesting when you look at demographics within the wireless-only households:

• more than half of all adults (54.0%) living with unrelated roommates, lived in households with only wireless telephones;
• half of all wireless-only adults were less than 30 years of age; a quarter of adults aged 18-24 years were in wireless-only households; nearly 30% of adults aged 25-29 years lived in households with only wireless telephones.
• adults living in poverty were nearly twice as likely (22.4%) as the national average to be living in households with only wireless telephones; non-Hispanic white adults (10.8%) were less likely than Hispanic adults (15.3%) to be wireless-only; adults living in the South (14.0%) were more likely than those in the Northeast (8.6%) to be part of wireless-only households.

The inability to reach households with only wireless telephones may have implications for results from health surveys, political polls, and other research. How will public opinion monitors avoid introducing bias if there are differences between people with and without landline telephones?

Are there comparable statistics for Canada?

Technorati Tags:
CDC, mobile, substitution

Working in a carrier environment helps identify the challenges of business-grade requirements for service delivery. While the needs of the corporate world are somewhat irrelevant to some, for the sake of argument, accept that agencies and departments within the government might be among those corporate clients.

Let’s assume that there are some employees who want or need to work from a remote location, like home, or from vacation. I would suspect that there are a number of corporate applications that these people might need to access that might require priority treatment over the kids’ gaming or music – either in the same location or on the same router at the ISP. Maybe it is a videoconference link or even a secured enhanced IM link. Maybe a mobile health care kiosk.

How does the industry provide network quality assurance for these applications in a ‘neutral’ network?

Is there ever a situation that might permit discrimination – let’s actually call it differentiation – between the various bit streams? Is it unreasonable to permit ISPs and their clients the flexibility to develop creative business relationships which enable such services?

Let me lay on a more consumer-oriented example. I just upgraded to the latest version of Joost. The software warns people:

Joost is a streaming video application, and so uses a relatively high amount of bandwidth per hour. In 1 hour of viewing, 320 Mb will be downloaded and 105 Mb uploaded, which means that a 1 Gb cap will be exhausted in about 10 hours.

If you pay for your bandwidth usage per megabyte or have your usage capped by your ISP, you should be careful to always exit the Joost program completely when you are finished watching it.

What if pay-for-use pricing or usage caps become a constraint for Joost or another application like it? Would it be OK for the application developer to enter into advertising or other agreements that enable it to pay for excess usage on behalf of its clients? Think of it as being analogous to toll-free calling, where the charges are reversed.

Notably, Tim Wu describes net neutrality as a network design principle, rather than a rigid requirement.

The internet isn’t perfect but it aspires for neutrality in its original design. Its decentralized and mostly neutral nature may account for its success as an economic engine and a source of folk culture.

It is important to note his selection of terms such as ‘mostly neutral’ in recognition that the internet has not been bound by a fixed regulatory (or network design) framework. Is it possible that part of the internet’s success as an economic engine is the variability enabled by its original design – the inter-networking of the internet?

Can the existing undue discrimination provisions of Canada’s Telecom Act provide sufficient protection to permit the continued evolution of flexible internet business models?

Technorati Tags:
Joost, net neutrality, Tim Wu

All businesses are regulated in some way or another, whether it is workplace safety, public health or consumer protection. Wednesday’s announcement from the Minister represents a move toward the continued normalization of regulation of the telecom industry.

As the statement from the CRTC says,

Both the Commission’s original framework and the modifications made by the Government today have the common objective of fostering competition in the Canadian telecommunications market.

The Cabinet directive gets us to that state faster.

Still, existing consumer safeguards, such as a price ceiling for stand-alone residential service will be maintained as well as continued price regulation in regions where there is little competition. Further, safety and social regulations, such as 9-1-1 and services for the disabled will remain.

The Competition Bureau will be an increasingly important guardian to address anti-competitive issues in the deregulated markets. The government has added $10.5 million over five years to its budget in order to strengthen its role in policing newly deregulated telecommunications markets.

Sheridan Scott, Commissioner of the Competition Bureau, will be a keynote speaker at The 2007 Canadian Telecom Summit on the afternoon of June 13.

Technorati Tags:
CRTC, Sheridan Scott, Competition Bureau

I think an editorial in the most recent issue of Computing Canada misses the point on the impact of net neutrality for businesses.

The editorial laments the fact that net neutrality has been handed losses in the US Senate and it is disturbed by statements from Industry Minister Bernier. Still, Computing Canada believes its readers’ voices need to be heard to convince government to pass laws requiring all Internet traffic to be treated the same by ISPs.

Net neutrality is indeed an important issue for business users large and small. If anything, the business community needs to clearly shout its rejection of net neutrality. While superficially, the objectives of net neutrality may sound noble and democratic, its effects are bad for business. Not only should carriers be concerned, but customers too.

Among the most problematic statements in the column:

As enterprises shift to more Web-based applications for everything from sales force automation to self-service customer tools, the need for a level online playing field is more important than ever.

In fact, the last thing companies deploying Web-based enterprise applications should want is vanilla-flavoured net neutrality restrictions.

Business-grade web-based applications often have to perform better than average. Enterprises and applications providers are happy to pay for the performance that matches their requirements. Enterprises often demand flexibility to leap-frog ‘best-efforts’ internet. Businesses want their applications to be handled in a discriminatory manner.

Net neutrality restrictions would preclude preferential treatment.

Enterprise customers don’t just want a two-tiered internet; they demands two, three and more tiers. Business requirements dictate a complete spectrum of internet services, a continuum of performance metrics, variable business models.

The editorial says

This is not the same thing as choosing between a T1 connection and dialup service: this is putting a premium on some URLs over others, a cost and legal burden that would not easily be borne in a country made up largely of small businesses.

Small businesses are precisely the kinds of customers that should oppose net neutrality.

Net neutrality would provide no better service for hosted banking than for movie downloads. Travel agents looking to grab a seat for their clients will compete with every other application on the internet, because net-neutrality will prohibit the reservations system from securing preferred treatment. Work at home virtual call-centre agents would have no choice but to put up with voice quality that may be less than acceptable, because net neutrality would forbid assigning a priority for that integrated application.

If net neutrality is imposed by legislation, large enterprises will return to more costly private networks to ensure their competitive edge. As a result, it is small business that could suffer the most. The answer isn’t for small travel agents and SOHO operations to be forced into dedicated data access lines. The answer is to let carriers and their customers work it out in the marketplace.

It is precisely because Canada is so dependent on the health of Canada’s small business engine that enterprises, large and small, should be so strongly opposed to net neutrality legislation.

Minister Bernier fully understands the importance of net neutrality, not just for carriers, but for the economic performance of Canada’s business community. That is why the Minister of Industry, charged with the responsibility of policy to support an information economy, understands why he cannot support net neutrality.

It’s more than just bad for business; net neutrality is bad policy.

Technorati Tags:
net neutrality, Computing Canada, Industry Canada, Maxime Bernier