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Over on the Tyee.ca Steve Anderson makes a few good points:

In last week’s speech from the throne and release of the budget, the government had an opportunity to address digital issues. All that was made clear, however, was that government is committed to opening Canada’s telecommunications and satellite industries to foreign ownership. Giving up on our capacity to meet this challenge and instead relying primarily on foreign investment schemes is not the answer. Such an approach would, at best, miss the lessons learned from the countries that are leading in broadband speed, access and cost.

Link: Why Are Tories Giving up on Canadian Innovation?

[ see also: Canada Needs a Serious Agenda for Media Innovation ]

In markets like the UK, foreign-ownership of carriers has been consistent with a high level of industry competitiveness and mobile innovation. However elsewhere like New Zealand the case is not as clear.

In the wired world, the models that work for driving advanced broadband typically have involved significant investment at the national or municipal level, effectively fibre to the curb as a fundamental public-good infrastructure service like gas, water, or roads with private ISPs servicing and marketing the last “mile” to households. Of course wireless couldn’t be more different. Tower-sharing and in-territory roaming requirements are a step in the right direction of reducing total infrastructure costs. However, instead of otherwise lowering barriers to entry the government seems to set up spectrum auctions as a way to take billions out of ICT investment rather than put it in.

Canada will be joining the ranks of nearly every other country on the planet (save Cuba, any others?) to allow foreign ownership of Canadian telecom companies. Even North Korea recently allowed foreigners to build out a mobile network there. Coincidentally, that was Orascom, the same wolf-in-Wind’s clothing that effectively broke through the regulation here in Canada.

The good news is that the Government is belatedly doing the right thing. They’ve recognized that their policy aims for stimulating industry competition are at odds with the facts on the ground, and at odds with Canada’s antiquated (pre-internet, pre-mobile phone industry) Telecom Act.

One might argue they should have done this before the 2008 spectrum auction. Thereby the feds could have given all the new entrants as well as the incumbents a more fair and level playing field for raising capital. Boy are some still bitter about that.

But not to worry, there’s still the big 700Mhz spectrum auction to come. That’s the real good stuff. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s also a yawning government deficit for which some of that foreign capital may slot in just nicely.

By the way, if you think that all this extracting billions from the telco industry by spectrum auctions will ultimately lower your wireless bill, you may in fact be dreaming.

But whatever, bring on the foreigners. Giddy-up, this business is gonna get interesting.

Tony’s stock options just went way up. So did Dave’s. Those next capital calls are looking much easier now.

On the other side, look for Vodaphone or t-mobile to buy Bell/Telus by sometime tomorrow.

LINK: Canada may consider foreign control of telecoms

Last week we had the pleasure to be in the audience of his googness^* Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. We found him there right in the very heart of darkness, the annual World Mobile Congress in rainy Barcelona. MWC itself was a fantastic clash of cultures between the stalwarts of each the PC and telcom worlds. Many of the latter you could see were distinctly concerned that the mobile industry is having less and less each year to do with this idea we used to call “telecom”. then into this heady environment walked Eric CEO of that great disruptor of worlds and flattener of industries, Google of Mountainview california. In the words of a red-colored Canadian wireless executive “google, love em, but we really can’t trust those guys”.

Here’s what Eric had to say:

The cloud + mobile is like having a million computers in your hand.

But all this potential of mobile means nothing without OPEN

This [the mobile industry, this conference] is the place to be for the PC industry, mobile web adoption is moving 8x faster than web adoption 10 years ago.

Indonesia, south Africa today have more mobile than web google searches. The rest of the world will be there soon.

Eric is here to thank the ecosystem the people who build the network. Your work is indispensable we can’t do anything without you. [But the tacit assumption google will now take all your base home with them].

Networks are now a way to instrument the world, what people are doing, what is going on .. if we want to and if users want us to. [being very careful to tread softly around previous privacy foot-in-mouth]

The cloud. The sim can now be used as an identifier for very sophisticated data in the cloud. With apps in cloud is all about sharing and replications. Not about local copies. A device that is not connected is lonely, it doesn’t do anything, it’s not interesting.

Why the phone? because it’s the high volume endpoint

New change at google is google-first. Not an intentional policy, but realizing that google is building the mobile apps first then making a web application. Mobile is google’s new default platform.

Cloud-based apps: An app that diagnoses your cough. Talking on phone to someone who doesn’t speak your language. Google googles snap a picture of museum, it identifies the museum tells you what’s in it and when it’s open.

[Your editor's epiphany: This is fully augmented reality! but not heads-up or heads down AR, this is "gopher AR" it's not about being immersed in the cloud all the time, it's about being immersed in the cloud any time. We don't need full time goggles, full time visual AR Layar-type experience, the killer apps may simply be those that let you "gopher" sticking your head up from the physical world to the cloud at any time]

Google is going to fight apple with flash. For google the killer app is flash games. Runs on hw acceleration
Taps in to existing flash games content. New adroids will run existing base (e.g. newgrounds) of flash games, giving google a games ecosystem right out of the box.

Google to carriers: we’re your friends honest! Want carriers to make money.

Google we need everyone to make money, we need the network, we are not going to provide infrastructure, we’re not optimized for that. Fixed gigabit project we announced is an rfp a test to share the learnings back with the industry [Now watch them turn voice and video into a universal free service outside the carrier, oops?]

^{*El Googerino? (maybe if you’re not in to the whole brevity thing)}

Some great events coming up in the Toronto mobile calendar:

MEIC 6

FEB 24, 3pm
Now the sixth event in the amazing series put together by the Mobile Experience Innovation Center (MEIC) An afternoon conference discussing the future of mobile content, services and experiences, MEIC6 will be held on February 24, 2010, from 3-7pm in the Central Hall at 100 McCaul St.

Speakers will include Gerald Karam, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, AT&T Labs – Research, and he will be speaking about: iLoveIt: Riding the accelerating adoption of Smartphones

RSVP is encouraged, click here. The event is free but given that game-day is today there may only be a few left.

ARDevCamp:

FEB 27, 10am

Toronto’s first Augmented Reality Unconference!
The MEIC and OCAD are pleased to be partnering with Winvolve, the Discovery Channel and other leading sponsors in Augmented Reality Developer Camp. ARDevCamp will feature a variety of speakers as well as the traditional “Open” format of unconferences, where participants drive the content.

This event is open to the public, and takes place Saturday February 27, 2010 from 10am-5pm at OCAD.
Further information and registration can be found here: http://artoronto.eventbrite.com/

Mobile Monday Toronto

March 1, 2010 6pm, MaRS
Mobile Monday’s ever-popular venture pitch night is this Monday. Come on out and watch as WirelessNorth.ca ourselves helps to moderate an all-star panel of mobile investors as they judge pitches from Canadian mobile startups. We promise to give them a good grilling.

If you have played with an android for any length of time, you may have noticed the neat battery tracking feature in the Android OS. When the battery reaches 15% the device will warn you that it’s low on power, and there’s a little button next to that that says simply “Why?”. Click on “why?” and the device will give you a nice bar graph breakdown on where the battery went. Here’s a screen cap from the google developer blog, apparently of a device that doesn’t get used much:

This is also a neat feature, because it gives us some insight into the design constraints for modern smartphones. Of course everyone’s millage will vary, but here are the averages across 5 different recharge cycles over a week’s time of daily usage for own android:

Note we’ve lumped together a few things like android core apps, android system, and android OS into one category of “android stuff” cause we’re not really clear on the difference between those things anyway. The foreground apps here were mostly things like gmail, maps, some foursquare etc.

A few other observations: holy cow do screens suck power! Still want that big beautiful screen on your next smart phone? Also power usage of background apps is highly sensitive to their update frequency. Apps like background news readers or twitter apps can actually suck up to 30% of your battery (we had this problem at first) until you tune down their update frequency. This is definitely something app devolopers should be sensitive to too.

How does your usage vary? let us know in the comments.

While your favourite major ISPs bemoan and gnash their teeth to regulators across North America about how hard it is to manage capacity and why they can’t possibly provide faster unfiltered access to the masses or to the independent resellers…

Google is launching experimental fibre broadband networks in several U.S. cities in an effort to push high-speed internet development.

The networks, which will be available to between 50,000 and 500,000 people “at a competitive price,” will offer connection speeds up of up to one gigabit per second, or more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today, Google said.

Google said it also wants to learn about deploying fibre, and it plans to share its networks so that other internet service providers can connect to it.

“We’ll operate an ‘open access’ network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers,” Ingersoll and Kelly wrote. “And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.”

In so doing, google is sticking a major fork in the eye of the ISP lobby. Of course the real impediment to ultra-highspeed broadband has always been a severe business model issue, never a technical one. With such bandwidth, last century’s distribution models like “broadcast TV”, “cable packages” or “paying for telephone service or long distance” become highly irrelevant.

Meanwhile in Canada, the CRTC still refuses to enforce their own mandates by not forcing Bell to offer anything more than 5Mbits of service to independent ISPs. For the record 5MBit is 200 times slower that a Gigabit.

Read more: Google launching fibre broadband networks

Yes that’s right, we’ll be bringing you wireless coverage straight from the heart of darkness, Mobile World Congress 2010 in sunny Barcelona. If you’ll be there too, drop this editor a line and we’ll buy you a beer. Or vice versa. That works too.

editor [at] wirelessnorth.ca
or @wirelessnorth on twitter

Packed house at Toronto Board of Trade this morning for Dave Dobbin president of the DAVE wireless group. No it wasn’t named after him. DAVE is the last “national” new entrant from Canada’s 2008 Spectrum Auction to announce their launch plans. DAVE has spectrum in places like Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto covering a lot of Canada by population, if not by area. They are also shut out of the east and Quebec, so they’ll need roaming arrangements outside of the big cities western and central cities.

Dave: In 2002 Tanzania got 3G, in 2007 Canada was still running 2G. In 2007 data cost thousands of dollars per gigabit, now $5. Since then then the mere threat of competition has transformed the industry. Now 6 3G+ networks available or under construction. System access fees are now gone, data prices have come crashing down.

This is small compared to what is coming next in Canada says Dave. It’s going to be a mess in Canada over the next year, and I’m happy to be a part of that.

Those carriers in the world with happiest customers, fastest growth, best at building shareholder equity are: focused on specific segments, do not have the cheapest prices, but they provide the best value. In Canada we don’t have Carriers like that.

Here are the answer to the top 3 questions about Dave:

Is there really enough room in Canada for another wireless provider?

Yes, for one penetration we have the lowest penetration in the developed world. If all we do is grow Canada from today’s penetration (70%) to just that of the US today (90%) would mean adding 6M new customers. That’s the size of Bell mobility.

Next consider wireless substitution, in Canada only 8% have substituted land lines for wireless. If we only catch up to the US today (20%) we could build a business the size of MTS alstream.

There are 10M customers, 4M prepaid + 6M postpaid who’s contracts come up for renewal every year. JD Power “only 20% of Canadian customers want to renew with their current carrier”.

Do you really have enough money to build a network

Equipment is so much cheaper now. Cell sites that used to require a shipping container sized instalation on the roof of a building, can now fit in a briefcase-sized box and are 3x as powerful. Also we are not covering the whole country we are covering urban cities.

How will you compete, wont the big guys crush you?
We are going to be the westjet of carriers. We’re not playing the same game we are going to be much more flexible. Anything that’s possible to outsource, we’ve outsourced. Our billing systems, our network is being managed (by Ericsson) global-scale companies are powering DAVE. DAVE is profit-sharing with these partners, aligning incentives between them and their suppliers.

When Launching?
We are launching in the “spring” in Toronto. But not until it is ready. Will only launch when it “works” [ed - so not like Toronto HydroOne Wireless then eh?]

CRTC, how is your foreign ownership going
Fine, it’s going well

what are you launching with?
Blackberry, Nokia, Sony Ericsson (no android announcement)

How are you competing?
We are NOT competing head-on. We are going for deep segmentation. We are are not going for premium customers who travel a lot or need big networks. We are targeting urban customers and we’ll give them the best value.

No contracts
If you like contracts, go to law school. We have no contracts and no subsidized phones. “When you go to Esso, to fill up with gas, they don’t sell you a car!”, “Your electricity company doesn’t try to sign you up for a new flat screen TV”. Handset subsidies is a broken model says Dave. [ed. but what about people that don't want to or can't afford to spend up-front for a phone? no financing options]

Name of company?
We will not be called DAVE wireless says Dave Dobbin who is getting tired of everyone assuming the company was named after him. [look for an announcement maybe even later today?]

That’s all folks.

UPDATE: Dave’s personal phone is a Google Nexus One. I mentioned that google phone’s would work well on DAVE’s AWS spectrum. He corrected me to say actually it works REALLY well on their spectrum but wouldn’t say more than that for now.

The Canadian wireless industry has come a long way in just 3 years. From the world’s crap hand-me-down phones, years behind the curve on 3G, and worse pricing on data than some 3rd world countries to…

• From zero to not one, not two but 4 (and soon to be more) national 3.5G HSPA GSM-standard networks in Canada
• New price plans from Wind, DAVE and Public shaking up the landscape.
• Fiercer competition between the major carriers now that they are all on the same network technology with all the same devices
• FAST 3G networks at 21MBs (and 4 of em!) that’s faster than any 3g network in the US
• Suddenly great deals on rocket sticks everywhere. And tethering that works and portable hotspots and other fun things.
• ATT&T is not in Canada, count your lucky stars
• Unlike on ATT&T, a 30% rate of call dropping New York or 100% anytime at SXSW in Austin, is not considered normal
• Not one but 3 choices of carrier for the iPhone, and more choices for the latest Androids and Blackberries
• Number portability, at last it was mandated and it gives consumers more power to switch
• Wireless penetration rates rising rapidly, and the appetite for smartphones by consumers that is taking even the carriers by surprise
• SIM cards on every network. (the market for unlocked phones is coming to Canada). Just wait for the Google phone store to get to Canada, unraveling the relationship between carriers and devices, sometime this year we can hope. And if we ever get Google voice, be ready for the perfect storm of telco disruption.
• And skype is starting to work well on mobiles, just to turn the screws on the legacy telcos a little more

If I were a carrier, I’d be a little stressed out by this heightened level of competition in the sleepy old wireless north (aka Canada). For anyone else working with mobile, it’s a great time to be Canadian. Call it pent up demand, leap-frogging, or sweet redemption for years spent at the back of the pack, but suddenly Canada is looking good at wireless. Expect big things this decade.

Agree, disagree or flame away.

Here’s an interesting experiment for blackberry fans, try using any other modern smartphone for a few weeks then switch back to your (aka non-storm) blackberry. Befuddle yourself in amusement as you jab futilely at big fat OK buttons on the screen, get confused as you try and quickly pinch-zoom or flick your tumb over the screen to speedily scroll down a webpage. It doesn’t work. Which, once you are used to them, it feels crazy because natural gestures are just such a great and easier way to handle many common mobile iteractions from launching an app to using the web. Sure, after an iphone or any slide-out keyboard, the famed berry bold/curve keyboard is a joy when hammering out emails, but for everything else the device feels like a relic. Like last-decade’s keyboard and mouse interaction paradigm crammed into a form factor it doesn’t belong.

We’re on your side here RIM, at wirelessnorth we like to cheer for the home team. But c’mon now. Would it kill you to let us grab hold of the screen once in a while?