It seems that every few months, we write that Israel continues to be a hotbed for telecom technology development, especially photonics and IP. We observed that Om Malik noticed Israel in June.

We believe that there is much that can be learned from such a small country that has been such fertile ground for technology development.

A little over a week ago, Lucent acquired another Israeli telecom technology company, Mobilitec, which offers a platform for managing streaming content services over 3G cellular networks.

Let me again encourage readers to think about attending the Israel Telecom conference and exhibition taking place November 6-9 in Tel Aviv. Over 200 of Israel’s leading ICT players, developers and service providers will be participating, along with a professional interdisciplinary conference with world leaders in the telecommunications community. There is an interesting executive level tour of Israel being organized to coincide with the timing of the trade show. Let me know if you’re interested in joining.

International Trade Canada will have a significant presence at Israel Telecom and it is offering to co-share space at the Canadian booth for Canadian companies (at reduced cost). In addition to booth space, companies will be able to meet the leading Israel ICT players at a number of value-added activities including one-on-one meetings, site visits, and hospitality events. For information on costs and registration, contact: Jessica Nachlas, Business Development Officer, Canadian Embassy, Tel Aviv.

By the way, I’m going to be taking this weekend off, in recognition of Rosh Hashana. I’ll be back on Monday.

Today just seems to be a day that the press is looking at the issue of blocking internet content.

Warren Kinsella writes in The National Post that Canada needs a better net nanny.

Last time anyone checked, making a death threat against a person was, indeed, an indictable criminal offence. So why would the CRTC even pause, for a moment, to impose a less-burdensome penalty — and when it has the clear mandate and power to do so?

Last month, we didn’t even ask the CRTC to order blocking. All we asked for was for the CRTC to permit ISPs that volunarily wanted to. We didn’t ask for a general framework. We looked at two specific sites.

I have been continuing to think about the expedited process that the CRTC is following to review its Local Forbearance Decision.

Following up on my Sunday blog posting, with some prodding I noticed that the CRTC only directed interrogatories to handful of VoIP resellers including Comwave, Cybersurf, Primus, Yak and Vonage. Why these service providers and none of the rest?

There are many, many more VoIP service providers.

It isn’t as though these are the only ones that the CRTC knows about. After all, the Commission has been notified by other providers subsequent to another proceeding that was looking at the customer notification requirements associated with 911 for VoIP.

Will the CRTC have enough data on the state of the market if it doesn’t even ask for input from the dozens of service providers it knows about, let alone the service providers that aren’t registered in any way? How will it know who the major players are, if it doesn’t even ask the question?