I recently met with John Maduri, who is now heading up a company with a rather unique approach to rural broadband, Barrett Xplore.

What’s unique? He isn’t looking for a government handout. He hasn’t gone to government agencies saying ‘Give me $$$ and I’ll deliver broadband to the unwashed, underserved, your down-trodden.’ Instead, Barrett is delivering a 99.99% available, city-quality broadband experience to anyone in Canada who wants it, no matter where they live or work.

What Barrett Xplore has done is built a viable business plan that uses various solutions, including Motorola Canopy technology where appropriate or Telesat Ka-band in other areas. They are actually adding customers at a respectable clip, with reasonable prices, and a positive NPV. The entire country is within their potential serving area.

Unfortunately, the CRTC’s Deferral Account Decision has created problems for Barrett. That Decision told the incumbent telephone companies that they could and should use excess payments (that subscribers made to prop up local rates in urban areas) to subsidize the incumbent broadband roll-out to rural areas. It was a Robin Hood decision – taking money from one group to give to another. Bell has appealed a part of the Decision to the courts; we can expect to see an appeal (or more) to Federal Cabinet in the next few weeks.

With the best of intentions, it seems that whenever we see these kinds of programs, there are problems. As I mentioned in my post about ICT Toronto, it just seems that we need to avoid trying to pick winners and we need to resist the temptation to intervene in the market. Like it or not, rightly or wrongly, Decision 2006-9 made it tougher for John and his venture to go out and compete. And it was all with the best of intentions by everyone concerned.

I’d like to think that we should be clearing out of the way of entrepreneurial ventures like Barrett Xplore, not putting obstacles in their way. Hopefully, John and Barrett Xplore will be able to look back at this as just a speed-bump, not a barricade, as they continue to bridge the digital divide.

Jeff Pulver has started a campaign to Save the Internet. The objective, in the words of Jon Arnold:

Hmmm. Who are the people who have controlled the Internet so far? Hasn’t a free-market, business-oriented approach been the main driver of the innovation to date? Even the most anarchistic software developers appear to have been seduced by the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

I can’t figure out what kind of Net Neutrality rules Jeff wants from the government. On one hand, he is looking for guarantees of wide open access – no interference in anyone’s bits. But use government interference to provide those guarantees. An internet world with no rules would mean that anyone can have anything, which sounds good on the surface. But that also means that someone could steal everything.

Think of the Internet as a public library. I suspect that in Jeff’s view, the doors never close and there would be no requirement for a library card. No one would even need to sign out a book – to maintain complete anonymity for the users. Users would return the books when they are done, because it is the right thing. Not because the operator of the library charged a fine for overdue books. And extra copies of the books in greatest demand would magically appear, so there was never a shortage of supply.

It is an interesting utopian view of the world and I hate to wake the dreamers – but there need to be reasonable limits. You want non-discriminatory access, but that doesn’t mean that there can’t be fees associated with certain applications that have atypical requirements. In the context of the Shaw/Vonage dispute, it seems to me that, as long as Shaw isn’t purposely interfering with Vonage users’ bits, there is nothing wrong with offering a premium service that has quality of service guarantees in exchange for a fee.

For as long as I can remember, and I have been using the internet for more than 20 years, there have been Acceptable Use Policies to apply a semblance of order. Open, but not free. That is where I draw the line.

There is no such thing as free. Someone always pays the price. The advocates for open and free internet are generally looking for someone else to be paying their bills. If we want the internet to thrive, let market forces figure out the rules.

I have been reading (itBusiness, Globe, Star) about Toronto’s plans to get onto the global map for Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) research, development and production. I have to admit I am more than a little bit cynical.

The city’s report claims that Toronto is third to San Francisco and New York for ICT in North America, and yet, the city wants more. It sounds like a Rodney Dangerfield cry for ‘We don’t get no respect’. So let’s throw some government money to make us feel better. Toronto is number 3 in North America. It wants to be in the top 5 in the world.

Why am I cynical? This is the same city that has fought the telecom industry whenever it wanted to install fibre under the streets. In fact, it feels so strongly about the evil wealth of the telecom sector, that it has used their tax dollars to fund court appeal after appeal after appeal of the CRTC’s decision that says cities have to stop pillaging the industry. As I have written before, the CRTC and the courts have told the cities: “Enough!”

Toronto is the same city that pays for its publicly-owned electric utility to offer free WiFi, not to provide high speed access to the underprivileged areas of the city, but to compete head-to-head against the private sector in the city centre.

Want a good start to stimulate ICT? How about declaring the GTA to be a ‘telecom friendly free-trade zone’? If carriers want access to upgrade facilities, why not welcome them with the same gusto that Toronto has for the movie industry? It seems to me that movie production trucks are a bigger source of traffic tie-ups than fibre-optic construction, but no one (including me) would complain about them disrupting the movement of cars. Let’s be as positive about new telecom infrastructure.

Fostering private sector competition – vigourous competion – is a way to stimulate the industry. Treating high tech infrastructure as a monopoly public utility is a guaranteed road to failure. Every time I hear the traffic reports talking about the continued closure of the intersection of Jane and Highway 7, it serves as a reminder that our governments already do a lousy job maintaining civil works like sewers and streets. Why would we want to trust government with the provision of critical electronic infrastructure?

Sure, government does a good job up front. It is the ongoing capacity planning and maintenance that are just plain underfunded. It’s only natural. Initial installations are sexy and make for good photo ops. Maintenance is boring.

A federal public servant that I respect once told me that governments typically do a lousy job of picking winners. If Toronto wants a strong ICT sector, it has to foster an environment that creates the right incentives for businesses to do it on its own.

Like a best practice for management, it seems to me that the key to fostering a stimulating, energized and creative work environment for ICT in Toronto is for government to clear roadblocks and then get out of the way while the industry does its own thing.

Rather than knocking on the doors of the existing private sector success stories and asking for them to contribute to pay for this new ICT initiative, let’s hope the mayor is receptive to just standing on the sidelines and cheering them on to do their own thing. Sometimes, the best form of stimulus may cost nothing at all.

I started getting strange messages from the Hilton Honors (HHonors frequent sleeper) program this evening. The first message was in German, sent at 9:18pm. Then a message in Spanish at 9:27. English followed at 10:25 and now French came in time stamped 10:27, right after the kind lady at HHonors Customer Help Desk said ‘don’t worry, we have the situation under control and it is now fixed.’

I called HHonors the first time right after the German message, but they transfered me to a line with no voice mail and I thought ‘oh well, no big deal.’ When the next language came through, I figured it was time to try to get it fixed.

While I have been on hold in the Hilton call centre, I traced the origins of the email messages. They appear to be legitimate, but errant. It appears that Hilton contracted out this campaign to Epsilon Interactive who pride themselves at being able to send out 5M emails per hour. That means that they could have easily sent these messages to the entire HHonors database – at least 4 times.

It seems to me that improved email practices can be learned from this incident. Obviously, this is an accident. But one of the problems I faced in trying to notify Hilton about a problem is that no one at their call centre is even aware of the campaign, there is no phone number in the message, there is no escalation process.

I wonder if any of the people in charge of email campaigns make a point of being included in every mailing – just so that they can see problems as they are happening. Clearly, that isn’t the practice at Hilton.

As a result, the easiest recourse for their Gold level members (the target of this campaign) is to filter out all email from HHonors, or unsubscribe completely. That is the last thing that Hilton wanted from this campaign.

I like to think of myself as being somewhat technically literate. I can program VCRs and can figure out most software without a manual.

I have a confession. I don’t like the menu systems I have used so far for digital TV. I think the set top box industry is trying to force a computer application into a TV remote form factor and it just isn’t working for me. My wife? Ha!

Scrolling through hundreds of channels? No thanks.

And when I want to search for a program, there has to be an easier way than selecting characters awkwardly with the arrow keys. Why isn’t it predictive? The system knows the names of all the shows – when I enter W, the search subsystem should offer a menu of shows that begin with ‘W’.

If I find difficult, then what about all the non-geeks out there who still haven’t changed the clocks in their cars to Daylight Savings time?

IP-TV service providers take note. As Apple proved with the iTunes/iPod combo, there are great returns for a company that provides an easy user interface.