With the Telecom Policy Review panel now having suggested a formal “Broadcast Policy Review”, it may be only a matter of time before Heritage Canada takes on such a project. How does June 14 sound for an announcement?

Not that the TPR Panel should get any particular credit for this. A source of ours hears that Heritage officials are apparently not very happy about the “gratuitous” comments from the Panel on point. The reality is that with a former CRTC Commissioner / Broadcast Exec as Minister of Canadian Heritage (Bev Oda) and a former CRTC Broadcast Executive Director as the Assistant Deputy Minister responsible for broadcasting (Jean-Pierre Blais), Heritage Canada has all the motivation it needs to start flexing its muscle on the what, when and how of the CRTC’s future direction in Broadcasting. The real help from the TPR comes in its suggested “get out of the way” approach to telecom.

A broadcasting colleague of ours suggests that “getting in the way” is exactly what Canadian Heritage and the CRTC need to do if the Canadian Broadcasting Act is to have any future.

Bev Oda broke the ice to broadcast executives at the Banff TV Fest last year. Gone was the traditional CBC and CRTC bashing; instead, the language was “stable long term funding” and “efficiency”. Watch for a triumphant return of Minister Oda to Banff in mid-June this year, perhaps announcing ways to bridge the historic conflict between Industry and Heritage.

We suspect that Heritage Minister Oda would like Industry Minister Bernier’s Quebec support for her program and, in any event, we suspect that this PMO will not tolerate the kind of public disagreements typical of former Heritage and Industry Ministers.

There is a nice possible one-two punch being set up here. Minister Bernier announces his response to the TPR at the Canadian Telecom Summit on June 13 and on the following day, will Minister Oda announce a Broadcast Policy Review during her speech at Banff?

Fox News is reporting that a Malaysian man, Yahaya Wahab, received a phone bill for 806,400,000,000,000.01 ringgit – the equivalent of about $250 Trillion from Telekom Malaysia. Of course, the accounting department at the phone company is right on top of this – with that kind of money at stake, I would hope so – they added a note to settle the account within 10 days or face legal proceedings.

Any suggestions for him? By the way, Malaysia is a competitive telecom market. Mr. Wahab may want to look into lower cost alternatives from the competition. Now that is a candidate for VoIP.

While Jeff Pulver may be trying to reinvigorate his VON franchise by changing the V to Video, I think there is still much to be done with voice. Not that there isn’t a lot of interesting work to be done with video, given its special data characteristics – it’s just that we have still barely scratched the surface with voice over IP services.

Andrew Hansen used an interesting term – PoIP – in his comment on my weekend posting. Too many service providers – or just plain confused customers – seem to be using POTS over IP: Plain Old Telephone Service over Internet Protocol. Many customers are swapping out their phone lines or PBXs and just putting in VoIP technology without any change in the way they are doing business. If you are just going to use your new equipment the same old way as before, then I think you are wasting time and energy going through a change.

It might explain why the CRTC thinks that VoIP is the same as POTS and it has therefore been continuing to apply the same regulatory framework to VoIP as it has to POTS. In the eyes of the CRTC, it’s just a different engine purring under the hood.

For all of the talk that VoIP transforms Voice into another computer application, the industry itself hasn’t done a great job promoting new services with all sorts of new capabilities.

If all we are doing is selling VoIP because “it’s cheaper” then we are wasting a lot of time and energy. There is a session at The 2006 Canadian Telecom Summit looking at Next Generation Voice and another talking to the leaders of today’s VoIP service. Another session will include the heads of Consumer Services for all of Canada’s leading carriers and yet another features the leaders of Business Services.

The Canadian Telecom Summit covers the full range of XoIP – Voice or Video – and looks at all of the issues, including Community Broadband outreach and dealing with the scourge of illegal content. It’s the only conference you need to attend.

There used to be a commercial that featured a bunch of photocopier sales people pitching their product to an executive – each one would say “and it’s almost as good as a Xerox”, until finally the executive says “I know, it’s almost as good as a Xerox” and the sales person answers “But this is a Xerox”.

I’m starting to wonder if access independent VoIP is heading down that road – almost as good as phone service, but not quite the real thing.

Are we willing to settle on mediocre quality of service to save a couple pennies, rather than demanding better?

Our use of cel phones may be conditioning our lower expectations for connection clarity, but don’t you miss those Sprint ads, promoting the crystal clear, pin-drop connection?

I’d like to know when VoIP companies will be able to advertise “we’re better,” rather than just going with “we’re cheaper.”