Wirelessnorth.ca

Not to mention Vancouver, Montreal and a lot of other great mobile development happening across the country, but it’s great to see Toronto (and Canada) earning some international recognition.

White boards abound, as groups of 20-somethings huddle around computers tweaking software that delivers CNN Money, Time and other tier-one news feeds to the BlackBerry and iPhone.

Only, Polar Mobile isn’t in Silicon Valley. It’s in Toronto. Conservative, cold, conventional Toronto — which is home to one of the world’s biggest clusters of mobile-application companies this side of Silicon Valley.

“It’s very much a hotbed,” said Michele Perras, director of the Mobile Experience Innovation Centre, a non-profit mobile-apps research and consulting organization. Perras estimates there are 200 mobile-apps-development companies in the greater Toronto Area, while another 750 GTA companies now have mobile-content offerings.

Proximity to several schools with world class computer-science and design programs, such as the University of Waterloo and the Ontario College of Art & Design, is one reason for Toronto’s emergence as a mobile-apps hub. Availability of public and private-sector funding is another, as is access to entrepreneurs and engineers who cut their teeth working at or with Blackberry maker Research In Motion Ltd.(RIMM), whose headquarters are just one hour west of Toronto in Waterloo, Ont.

just a few years ago, would you have expected such a headline?

LINK: Toronto Becoming A Hub For Mobile-Apps Companies [WSJ]
Non-paywall version: here

In theory, cable TV is a dead media. We have sufficient technology, today, that we can stream any episode of anything ever recorded, anytime, in real time, and in HD to any broadband household. A few decades from now, this whole idea of only being able to watch pre-selected recorded content at certain hours of the day is going to seem awfully strange and quaint. Not to mention the bizarre ritual of millions of subscribers manually making millions of copies of that content on their PVRs when perfectly good original copy already exist on the cloud.

Now in reality, traditional cable/satelite tv isn’t going away anytime soon. The service is reliable, it offers an important easy/lazy level of usability that pc-based alternatives haven’t nearly matched yet. But clearly the writing is on the wall. And services like netflix streaming, and boxee, and youtube, and many others are closing in.

BUT! great news for endangered cable executives everywhere: guess who controls all of the last-mile internet pipes in North America? It’s like having foxes as the sole provider of the chicken pipelines.

Even Michael Hennessy Telus’ top lobbyist has been sounding the alarm that the real net neutrality issue isn’t net neutrality, it’s vertical integration. This concerns, because Telus doesn’t have the same media assets as Bell and Rogers.

When companies with substantial media assets and huge legacy distribution businesses (a.k.a. cable tv) also own the only pipes into your home, it would be crazy not to expect them to use every available lever to favour their own content stack over any others.

And so on the eve of netflix coming to Canada, Rogers cuts their broadband caps (again).

Rogers “extreme” cable option is advertised as 15 Mbps with an 80GB cap at $60/month before taxes and other fees.

For the record, at full theoretical advertised speed, 80GB would earn you 12.9^* hours of usage a month, or just under 30 minutes of usage a day.

^{80GB = 696,320 megabits / 15 megabits per second / 3600 seconds in an hour = 12.9 hrs}

ps. why would this apply to wireless? Well for one it’s all the same players, for another tv and video streaming can be wireless too, and perhaps most importantly all of this logic could apply to separating voice service from wireless pipes as well.

Over the years, we’ve witnessed many desperate ways to stay connected from the woods, from expensive and slow wimax boxes bolted to trees, ziplock-bagged rocket sticks hoisted up flagpoles to, horror of horrors, surfing the internets exclusively by blackberry web browser.

This summer is different. This summer at WirelessNorth.ca’s secret floating headquarters, deep in Canada’s cottage country, we’ve got ourselves a Bell Turbo hub. The turbo hub is a 3G modem, wifi router, and several things all rolled into one shiny box. A bunch of carriers are selling them. Rogers calls it a “rocket hub”. In this case, the choice of Bell came down to testing some convenient Bell and a Rogers sim cards. In our particular location, Bell signal strength is consistently the strongest. Your mileage may vary. (Also remember that Bell and Telus share the same 3G/HSPA+ network so those two should be as good as the other).

The Bell/Ericsson Turbo hub is great! Dead sexy device (if not very woodsy-looking) all dressed in death-star black. And it does exactly what it says on the tin. You just plug this one device and one cord into the wall, and bingo you’ve got an active internet hotspot. Your network starts with WPA security by default, with the network code printed on the back of the device (protip: case-sensitive).

The thing also has jacks for everything: 4 wired Ethernet ports, usb port for network storage, phone jacks for some kind of phone service. All that’s missing is a partridge in a pear tree. But, for most people, 3G to wifi hubbing is probably what you are buying it for.

For basic connectivity, the big advantage of a hub vs tethering or a stick is that it allows more that it connects several devices (the whole household) instead of just one. The main disadvantage is that it’s tethered to the wall and doesn’t fit in your jeans. [whoa, Is that a rocket hub in your pocket or are you... etc.]

But here’s the kicker. Like most data devices still out there, the Ericsson hub only supports 7.2MBps 3G. 7.2 3G isn’t terrible, you’ll see effective speeds close to that of 5MBit DSL but with somewhat higher latency. But it’s a shame because 7.2HSPA is only one third the speed of what Canada’s networks are actually capable of. But it’s a shame because 21.6 HSPA devices (only usb sticks for now) have turned to be so surprisingly awesome. The difference in speed is very much noticeable. For this we must give the hub one hammer.

For a company that makes almost all it’s business from cellular infrastructure, it’s a puzzle that Ericsson’s own devices can’t use to the network to it’s fullest. Nonetheless, the product is a pretty good connectivity option and it beats climbing a tree with a coathanger and a blackberry in your teeth. Recommended.

The Good Easy to set up Lots of ports: phone, usb storage, ethernet Does everything but make you breakfast Good wifi performance The Meh 7.2 MBps HSPA The Hammers IF ONLY it supported Bell’s network at full speed 21MBps HSPA+ it would be perfect Breakfast not included

Back in June Industry Canada sent our fine blog an invite to participate in the consultation for Canada’s digital strategy. Being the opinionated sots sorts that we are, were (http://de-en.gc.ca/submissions/“>amongst many others) were happy to help out. A few of our ideas:

• Addressing some remaining sore points in Canada’s mobile services: international roaming and Canada’s world-leading contract lengths.
• Do not let future spectrum auctions act as a deadweight tax on connectivity: Reinvest all spectrum proceeds back into Canada’s digital economy
• On not feeding the dinosaurs: be wary of legacy business models and interests capturing the digital agenda, actively invest in new models and in disruption
• Invest in policy that enables any/all Canadians to be creators and innovators
• Waive tax on the pipes: Exempt wired and wireless data service from GST/HST
• Establishing better metrics and targets to measure Canada’s digital competitiveness

LINK: Read the full text here

Drawing a card from the world of packaged goods, Canadian carriers are fighting toothpaste style wars for mind share and shelf space. You may have noticed toothpastes, energy drinks, shampoos and snack foods all come from mostly the same few producers, with at best only slight variation in actual ingredients. What you do in a maturing to saturated market is you compete on essentially-meaningless brand and product innovation, using sheer variety to elbow your competitors out of their shelfspace and mindspace.

Now combine that with the Canadian wireless industry. Canadians love to hate their carriers. There’s always an attractively large segment of subscribers ready to switch, churn or sign up for the first time. Meanwhile Canadians know new carriers are launching and have pent up demand for new choices. New choices the entrants thought they were going to have for themselves.

And so the news:

Rogers Communications is launching another wireless discount brand, named Chatr, to compete with new carriers Wind, Mobilicity and Public Mobile, sources say.

Chatr’s main purpose will be to match new entrants with lower prices and cheaper phones without diminishing the quality appearance of Rogers’ core brand, according to a source with Rogers who did not want to be named.

Now with Chatr, Rogers can surgically target the very specific geographies wherever the new entrants launching and undercut, or just out-market the upstarts with their own fake-new brand.

By opening up the industry to new entrants, Industry Canada’s goal was to drive competition. No doubt they were hoping to spur such competition by price, service quality and transparency more so than by marketing spend, general bamboozlement, and geographic discrimination.

Things could get interesting for consumers if Rogers adopts an aggressive enough scortched-earth strategy in key markets. At least for a few years, until the entrants are driven out or bought-up after their five year licenses are up. Building new national brands from scratch won’t be cheap or easy for Rogers^*. However, all incremental consumer acquisition, or just consumer confusion, is a win and drives up the brand-building costs to new entrants as well. Love it or not, Chatr could work. Let’s see what Chatr Rogers has to offer.

LINK BGR: Rogers to launch Chatr, a new low-end brand to compete with WIND
LINK CBC: Rogers launching another wireless brand

^* Though can’t be as expensive as spending a billion dollars on the biggest share of AWS spectrum and then not even turning it on.

The great white north recently got a little bit wireless-lessier, even if it is just south of the 49th parallel for now.

For half a decade, airlines have been farting around with trying to get internets on aeroplanes. Well Air Canada has at last achieved the perfect trifecta: Airplane AND wifi AND power plugs. At least over the US for now. This is posted somewhere over the desert, costs $10 for 600kBits/sec effective bandwidth. Ok so you won’t winning any fast twitch online games from the sky, but for than work purposes, more than effective.

Ten bucks is not a terrible price to pay (you’d pay a least that in lattes anywhere else for 4-5 hrs of inter netting). We approve. And the world is one more step closer to total ubiquitous connectivity. Three cheers for “cloud” computing. At this rate, someday you might even be able to stay connected in absolutely crazy places, like the in any of Canada’s subway tunnels (used by millions every day). But we digress.

Anyway, good job Air Canada.

Previously on WirelessNorth.ca: Woo! AirCanada bringing in flight wireless

Hang on to your hats, we have not one, but two great event deals for you today:

WirelessNorth.ca is proud to partner with Interactive Ontario for the Toronto iP3 Forum June 21. The WirelessNorth community receives a 30% discount off registration.

Join 200+ executives, entrepreneurs, developers, designers, engineers, marketers, and other members of the mobile and digital industries June 21 for Interactive Ontario’s first-ever one-day Forum devoted specifically to the business and technological impacts of Apple’s Touch Platform.

Keynote speaker Ajit Jaokar, Founder of futuretext, UK, will kick-start the day with a mind-expanding talk titled “Invisible Touch: The Invisible Impact of Apple’s Platform” where he will tell us what the real opportunities are for designers, developers and business thinkers; those opportunities that we’re just not getting yet.

LINKS: iP3 Event Info – iP3 Registration

WirelessNorth.ca is an advisor to Jumpwire Media the presenters of CrossMedia TO, a half-day session happening on July 21, 2010, at MaRSDD in downtown Toronto. Use Registration Code: WIRELESS2010 to get 15% off.

Here’s the scoop on this event:

Cross Media TO 2010 features an all-star line-up of industry executives and technology experts. Our goal is to bridge the gap between the different media sectors in order share information and find new opportunities. We want the gaming people to meet the TV people, the publishing people to meet the web video people, and everyone to meet the advertising people but let’s be honest, in the end, it’s all about the money. Headline speakers include Lisa Charters – SVP Director Digital for Random House of Canada, Sabrina Geremia Head of Agency Relations for Google Canada, Pete Watson – Senior Business Development Manager for RIM and Steve Pratt – CBC’s Director of Digital Music. Other special guests include Chris Van Noy – Akamai’s Chief Strategist, and Dr. Siobhan O’Flynn – Transmedia Consultant.

LINK: Crossmedia info and registration

Get to it. I am expecting you all to be mobile media geniuses before the leaves hit the ground.

We like Tony, he has the Clash on his iPod. This morning he came out swinging at the Canadian Telecom Summit. Here’s our on-the-fly notes from his keynote, and the “rebuttal” from Rogers Rob Bruce.

ICT is critical to the future competitiveness of all Canadian Industries. We need to infuse digital iniovation into every capilary of the economy, that’s how canada will compete

In terms of infrastructure, we know you are making massive investment so it’s critical we have the right regulatory environments

Also need to encourage investment in infrastructure so that canadians have access to world leading services.

Another priority is opening canada’s doors to VC and foreign insvestment. OECD rates Canada one of the most restrictive to foreign telecom investment.

We need to give access to capital and create the competition that will benefit all Canadians. (The big news) releasing a consultation paper on foreign competition in telecom.

Want to rely more on market forces and less on regulation

This government believes in “greater competition, free markets (less regulation) and more choice for consumers”

Summary: Dear telecom industry, digital policy is not about you, it’s about every other sector of the economy. Give Canadians choice and accessible access to world-leading telcom or…. else[?]”

Rogers:

Thanks to the minister. Glad to see a minister here and engaged in these important topis. [dramatic pause] At Rogers, we’re in favour of market forces and level playing fields too.

Remember that Canada is not the only country driving the digital agenda. And that’s because telecom is vital to the future economy everywhere in the world.

[same words, slightly different agenda]

We invest in infrastructure, we invest in innovation and we want to keep doing so with every dollar we can. We are investing 2B a year in netorks. Take the telco sector, look how many jobs we create!

The can telecom sector is innovative and competitive. I used to work for pepsi and in the height of the cola wars, competition never felt so fierce.

our critics [that's us! our heart flutters -ed] attack us on pricing and innovation. According to one study, average revenue per minute, canada has 3rd lowest pricing per minute acording to survey of 20 OECD countires. [but a far cry from free eh? which it really well could be, in theory, when compared against the enormous pipe-width of mobile broadband compared to what voice actually requires-ed]

Rogers says entry level pricing is cheaper than the US. Says networks are much more reliable.

With tethering, we let customers share data between smartphone and a computer. Iphone customers in the US can’t do this.

[Rogers is comparing itself to AT&T, but that's a pretty low bar isn't it?]

Network and network performance – Canada is one of the only countries in the world offering 3 networks at HSDPA+ [true that]

there’s no need to set targets, we’re raising the bar on our own. I see a dynamic communications industry, leading and innovating. We need to work together. [blah blah, how about a targets of actual penetration of advanced technologies, we think those would be good bars to set]

We support regulation that supports where we’re going not where we’ve been. to drive digital economy forward we need to embrace the future not protect the past [kudos here. Remember that Rogers, is among the good guys in pushing for a better C-32 copyright bill.

What we ask is immediate action on 3 fronts: industry and government needs to work together more tightly.

Canada pays some of the most expensive spectrum licence fees in the world.
In Japan there are no auctions, carriers are charged less for spectrum which allows carriers to invest more in infrastructure. [ok so now rogers is willing to compare themselves to Korea and Japan. But the the point is valid, taxing the hell out of spectrum is hardly a handy way to bring down the cost of ICT infrastructure.]

We also need government help for rurual access.

For the last week or so, we at WirelessNorth.ca headquarters have been trying out Bell’s first foray into the Android world with the Bell Motorola Dext. You may remember that Bell and Telus have been jointly spending billions over the last 3 years rolling out a new nationwide HSDPA network. A big driver for such a major strategy shift was to allow these two carriers to catch up to Rogers in being able to offer the latest GSM based devices like the iPhone and now the Android.

The Dext was originally launched by Motorola back in October 2009 but, after some delays, Bell is just launching it now. Bear this in mind, this delay explains a lot about some design decisions that might otherwise be perplexing about the device. Six months may not sound like a long time, but that’s a whole half a generation in the hyper-accelerated dog years of the current smartphone industry.

What we like:

The phone is built well. The Dext is by no means dead sexy, but it’s solid and it feels sturdier than the first generation Google G1 slider phone.

At launch, the Dext is pretty cheap from Bell. $79 with the usual (egregiously long 3yr) contract or $399 without. Nonetheless, this compares favorably with top-end Android phones which tend to hover around $200 subsidized or $600+ new. Bear this in mind as well. We at WirelessNorth.ca are all for (almost) anything that helps make smartphones more accessible to more Canadians.

The DEXT is no DROID. Whereas the Droid (Milestone in Canada) is Moto’s top-end smartphone, complete with huge screen and snappy processor and the latest Android OS. The Dext not so much. While being a budget Android, Dext is still a well featured device the goodness you would expect: an (ahem, vintage) Android OS 1.5, 7.6MBps 3G, GPS, Wifi, touchscreen, a real web browser, an acceptably useful camera etc.

The Dext also comes with MotoBLUR, Moto’s proprietary social-sauce add-on for Android. When you first turn on the device, the phone asks for your log-on credentials to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Gmail and more. So after handing over all the keys to your every online identity (what could go wrong?!), the fun starts. Motoblur aggregates all your contacts and status updates from all your social services. The phone asks if you want to sync all your phone contacts with either Facebook or Twitter. So that whenever you look up a contact you see their current avatar and status. Every phone should do this. Motoblur also has some potentially handy cloud features like online backup and device remote locate/wipe.

Other MotoBLUR features are less handy. There’s a universal inbox that supposed to pull in all sms, tweets and email. But for us it didn’t add enormous value when the likes of Twitroid and Gmail offer slightly better clients on their own. And then there are the desktop widgets. The Dext lets all kinds of social updates stream to your Android desktop. Motorola calls these “happenings” (slightly incongruous hippie connotations anyone?). In some future revision MotoBlur we think this might be a great feature. For the moment, limited screen real estate only displays one tweet at a time, and the most frequent update rate is … “once per day”. For someone with a few hundred to a few thousand contacts on various social networks, an always-on display of one arbitrary tweet per day is… less than useful.

Caveats:

A downside going with MotoBlur is that it saddles the phone with an outdated version of the Android OS, Android 1.5. Astute readers will note that this puts the Dext at about 4 versions of Android behind the latest 2.2 just recently released to users of unfettered Google (NexusOne) phones.

One of the advantages of owning an Android is that you should be benefiting from the rapid iteration of updates as Google steadily improves the OS. We have yet to hear from Bell or Motorola when Dext users in Canada can expect some overdue updates, but we’ll update this post whenever we find out. For now we have to give the phone a hammer for OS1.5.

You may recall the WirelessNorth.ca mobile device rating scheme. We merely start with the expectation that every device should be designed perfectly. From there we subtract one “hammer” just for the average number of times in the day you’d feel like whacking the phone (or it’s designer) with a hammer.

There are two more hammers. The first is the processor. Under the hood, the MotoDext runs an Arm11 cpu. The Arm 11 is an old design of the same class as powered the original iPhone and the Android G1. Newer/better smartphones these days are running the much speedier (but confusingly named) ARM CortexA8 based designs like the snapdragon processor in the NexusOne or Milestone. The Dext cpu is just fine for running all the basic Android functions, and the device is great at streaming video (e.g. Youtube) over 3G at full screen resolution. However, more demanding apps like many newly released Android games can be unplayable slow on the device.

The last hammer is for battery life. Brand new, with everything turned on, the device will just barely last you the day. Play with some apps or stream a few videos on your morning commute and you may find yourself running low by lunchtime, or have the phone run flat on you just before you’re trying to meet someone for dinner. Unlike, say, BlackBerries, Android devices are not known for good battery life. In this case, a less efficient processor combined with a lot of background processes don’t help either. MotoBLUR does provide some battery saving modes, but we sill found ourselves wanting to carry around the charger a lot.

These three hammers are the worst we can say about the phone. If you can live with these drawbacks, the phone has a lot to offer. It beats the pants off any feature phone and it compares well against what else passes for budget smartphones out there. For web/internet connectivity the Dext beats any EDGE-only BlackBerry, and (assuming we eventually see some updates) you can say at least it’s not based on a dead-end platform like WinMobile6 (which against all rational sense all carriers are still selling).

Conclusion: The Bell Dext is probably one of the best deals out there for getting your hands on a relatively inexpensive Android

So, with caveats, we can recommend the Dext. The most important caveat is that it won’t last you well a full 3year contract. It’s a good 2-year phone… that Bell is selling 6 months late. But then again the stats say most people do replace a phone every 18months anyway. Otherwise, you can expect it’s CPU to struggle with future apps as faster Androids become the standard. You can also expect the already tight battery life to certainly not improve after a few year’s use. Of course, more future-ready Androids will drop to it’s price point at some point. But, for a window of time the Bell Dext is probably one of the best deals out there for getting your hands on a relatively inexpensive Android. With “only” 3 hammers against it, we’re prepared to give the Bell Motorola Dext a firm rating of “WirelessNorth.ca: Mostly Satisfactory”.

Thanks again to Bell for kindly providing the hardware for our testing.

The Good The Price Android OS Solid build quality A couple handy moto-blur features The Meh Modest screen size The rest of moto-blur (but future versions could be promising) The Hammers Pretty terrible battery life Android 1.5 1997 called and want’s their mobile processor back

UPDATE June 14, 2010: That didn’t take long. Virgin Mobile Canada (which you know is also Bell) just launched the HTC Legend at $79 ($349 no plan) with a slightly faster processor and Android 2.1. The iPhone4 release also pushes the price of the iPhone 3GS down to $99. The poor Dext is now a tough sell unless it’s price comes down significantly (and/or until Moto comes out with a damn Android 2.1 or better update).

With all the attention around certain robot and fruit themed mobile gadgets these days, let’s not forget Canada’s own Research In Motion. RIM pretty much invented the smartphone. Currently RIM continues to pile on marketshare relative to all comers thanks in large part to a laser-like focus on solid mobile experience design.

So we’re really excited that the MEIC* has landed two top experience designers from RIM to speak at this month’s MEIC event. If you are in Toronto, highly recommended. Here are the details.:

MEIC 7
OCAD Auditorium
100 McCaul St
Friday, May 28 at 4:00 pm

DESIGNING THE BLACKBERRY EXPERIENCE

Join Research In Motion’s Joey Benedek and Wesley Yun as they talk about the growing importance of the user experience at RIM — and the challenge of finding the right talent to fuel ongoing growth.

DEMOs: MEIC Research + Prototyping Presentations

• Mark Green, UOIT, Educational Apps for the iPhone: Initial Design Explorations
• Jim Brown, Admeris
• C. Alex De Freitas, University of Auckland, NZ; Gabe Sawhney, EchoMobile
• Denis Coyne, Nightingale Creative; Adam Clare, WeroCreative
• Vivek Shivhare, University of Waterloo; Ted Brunt, marblemedia

Tickets are free but limited, register here