Telecom Trends

The good folks at Google have given me notice that they will no longer support blogs such as mine that are hosted on my own website, so I will be porting the content over to new tools from Wordpress, over the course of this weekend. Watch for a new style on Monday.

If you are reading updates through RSS, I hope to have things working properly by Monday. There should be a new posting Monday morning. Contact me if you aren't getting the new posts.

Hopefully, everything will be done before I have to face the freezing temperatures early Sunday morning, barbecuing wings for the annual Goldberg Superbowl party, a tradition dating back 13 years to Elway's back-to-back victories.

What are you doing for the "big game"?

Earlier this week, Aricent announced an initiative called Experience Engineering and I received a briefing on what was meant by the term.

In effect, Aricent is offering its range of expertise to help service providers develop a holistic approach to delivery of customer services and applications. It means more than just buying switches and support systems and devices that inter-operate. As many of us have found first hand, it is one thing for a device to work on a network; it is something different for a customer to enjoy a 'wow' experience.

Arun Sarin, the former chief executive of Vodaphone, has joined the Aricent board. He said:

Service providers are in a unique position to deliver innovative mobile services that integrate best in class devices, high performance networks, and a virtually unlimited set of applications and services into a single compelling subscriber experience. Aricent’s Experience Engineering is the first engagement model of its kind that assists operators through the innovation, development and delivery phases of their experience strategies. It’s very timely given the top strategic concerns of carriers today.

Aricent includes "frog design", continuing to operate as an independent division.

With new service providers launching low price offerings in Canada, which carriers consider the total customer experience as a means of differentiation and a justification for premium pricing?

i-Waterfront was featured in a story in yesterday's National Post. The article was about plans to award a fibre-optic contract in the Toronto Waterfront project.

The theme of the story is that the deal offers an insight into how the agency spends our tax dollars. It starts out by examining the legal gymnastics to launder the influence of the New York-based hedge fund that controls Connex See Service, the proposed provider of fibre optic service to "i-Waterfront." The company is a successor to Cygnal Technologies.

The project is running well behind schedule. Two years ago, the Globe and Mail ran a story that quoted Waterfront Toronto's executive director of Intelligent Communities saying:

Incumbent companies say, 'What's the problem? We have broadband and it's improving all the time.' The analogy I use is broadband is like a paved street. Incumbent companies are saying they're going to have paved roads but only have them one lane wide. If they're only one lane wide, there's not much point, is there?

Sounds good if you say it fast, but it doesn't really reflect the way networks are being built.

For example, most multiple dwelling units - apartment buildings - are already getting fibre to the building. In fact, most new buildings are getting fibre from multiple suppliers, cable and telcos. In Atlantic Canada, Bell Aliant, in a competitive marketplace, will continue its FTTH expansion with 140,000 homes to be passed by year-end.

Instead, Waterfront Toronto, a government agency, envisions establishing a monopoly provider of fibre. This may provide the ego-boosting benefit of saying that the project isn't dependent on the incumbents, but it ignores more than a hundred years of communications history that taught us that the only entity that delivers worse service than a regulated monopoly is a government-owned monopoly. Waterfront Toronto is jointly owned by all three levels of government and will have an unregulated monopoly service; can it get any better?

Most RFPs have clauses that ask for assurances that the bidder is financially sound. The company that appears to be selected by Waterfront Toronto somehow escaped such scrutiny. Perhaps the failure of Cygnal Technologies might have been a clue that the business model itself might be flawed.

Many RFPs aren't really looking for proposals; they already specify a solution and are just looking for a quote that matches. By specifying the solution, did the RFP limit the degrees of freedom of potential bidders to provide creative solutions?

Does anyone really believe that there is a shortage of advanced telecommunications solutions in the core of Toronto? The competitive commercial and consumer marketplace is delivering advanced solutions today.

Looking at the condition of our sewers, roads and other government infrastructure. Cutting the ribbon creates a great photo op, but maintenance is notoriously underfunded. I call it a "just-too-late" approach. Not sure I would want that from the people providing my advanced communications services.

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Update [February 4, 7:30 am]
Bell Canada announced its first large scale Fibre to the Home deployment for the greater Quebec City area. This raises even more questions about the need for Waterfront Toronto's approach.

Bell Labs is leading an initiative called Green Touch to fundamentally change and dramatically reduce the amount of power consumed by the communications industry in running the world's networks.

The objective is a thousand fold reduction: consume as much power in 3 years as conventional networks require in a single day. This efficiency target appears attainable based on research from Bell Labs that determined that today’s information and communication technology (ICT) networks have the potential to be 10,000 times more efficient than they are today.

Bell Labs has recruited founding members for the consortium from industry, academia and government research groups as well as service providers, including AT&T, China Mobile, Swisscom and Telefonica.

The first meeting of the consortium will take place later this month, to establish a five-year plan, first-year deliverables, and member roles and responsibilities.

At this point, there are no Canadian carriers, suppliers, research institutes or universities that are part of the initiative. Why not?

Combining mobility with simplicity, DAVE wireless announced it will operate under the brand Mobilicity.

President Dave Dobbin and Chairman John Bitove announced the new brand this morning, saying that the company will have simple guiding principles: no contract, no credit check, unlimited.

Service is to begin in Toronto in the Spring, with roll-out later in the year to Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary and Ottawa. The company says it wants to resolve any potential launch bugs before going to market and having to fix issues with disatisfied customers later.

Yesterday, in attempting to clarify reporting rules for high speed digital access, the CRTC may have muddied the water a little more.

The problem is found in paragraph 22 from Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2010-50?

Parties to a high-speed DNA services forbearance application must provide the Commission with the addresses of all buildings that are connected to that carrier's network at speeds of DS-3 or greater irrespective of whether services at speeds of DS-3 or greater are currently being provided to that carrier's customer(s) located in that building and irrespective of whether the fibre facilities are lit (commissioned) or dark. Carriers are required to provide the addresses of the buildings that are so connected, not merely the addresses of the buildings where high-speed DNA services are currently being provided to customers.

The intent, I think, is for competitive carriers to report a list of addresses of all buildings that are connected to their network with any kind of access facilities that could deliver higher than 45 Mbps. This report would be analyzed by the CRTC after an ILEC believes that there is a meaningful level of competition for high speed access services.

But the CRTC's language is awkward and oxymoronic. After all, if fibre facilities are "dark", then they are not connecting a building at any speed, let alone greater than 45Mbps.

Further, competitive access carriers frequently don't provide DNA-type access; many deliver ethernet access services. As a result, the last sentence is not meaningful. Finally, the tone of the paragraph appears to seek information only for fibre connectivity, and it may also imply that only dedicated access services are relevant. These are inconsistent with principles of technical neutrality.

My suggestion for an erratum would use simpler language, such as:

Parties to a high-speed DNA services forbearance application must provide the Commission with the addresses of all buildings that are connected to that carrier's network with facilities capable of access speeds greater than 45Mbps, irrespective of whether such access services are currently being provided in that building and irrespective of whether the facilities are commissioned or dark.

The 2010 Canadian Telecom Summit opens in 18 weeks.

The first version of the brochure is now available [ pdf, 280KB] and you will see that the programme is filling up.

Momentum is building with delegate registrations running well ahead of last year's pace. Early bird rates are in effect through the month of February. save by registering this month.

The conference hotels are now available for booking; over half our delegates are from out of town, so we try to help with negotiating space and preferred rates. Delegates will notice lower hotel prices for this year, while the hotels are still including the amenities, such as free internet access and complimentary shuttle service to The Toronto Congress Centre, home of the conference itself. The Airport Renaissance has been rebranded as the Sheraton Toronto Airport Hotel & Conference Centre: it is now part of the Sheraton family.

We are really pleased to involve experienced journalists in the role of moderators for some of our sessions this year. Greg O'Brien, editor of CARTT.ca will be moderating our Regulatory Blockbuster this year; Mark Evans, formerly with National Post and now heading up his own consulting firm, will be leading the discussion at a session we are calling Business Models 3.0: Financial implications for content and carriage. Visit the conference website for more program details.

The Canadian Telecom Summit is the largest and most important gathering of Canada's communications industry. Have you registered yet?