Blang!

On May 16th, the government of Canada appointed Tim Denton to the CRTC. Ordinarily, CRTC appointments don’t generate much interest even for a CRTC watcher like myself, but this one was different.

For one thing I happen to know Tim Denton from the time I spent trying to convince the CSCN CRTC working groups that ENUM was a worthwhile thing. Tim has been a long time proponent of ENUM and is the maintainer of the www.enumorg.ca website.

But more importantly, Tim is a Nethead. And not just any nethead. Way back in the ancient internet time of March 1999, Tim wrote a report for the Federal Department of Industry entitled “Netheads Versus Bellheadsкомпютри.”

With the value of hindsight, we can see that some nine years latter the report predicted with startling accuracy exactly where the Bellhead mentality would lead.

Ok, now this is just getting embarrassing. A couple of blog posts ago I poked fun at Bell for claiming to be the first in North America to offer voicemail-to-email since the VoIP providers have been doing this forever.

But, in an effort to prove that Canadian Telcos are competitive, at least when it comes to making laughable claims of innovation, Telus has just announced that they are the first to offer voicemail-to-email.

Quote: “for the first time in Canada, a highly convenient voice mail-to-email function”

I mean seriously, I can understand Bell & Telus pretending Vonage, Primus and all other VoIP providers don’t exist, but how can Telus pretend that Bell, by far the largest telco in the country, doesn’t exist?

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Well this one I just can’t resist. Bell made a big deal out of a press release today trumpeting their “new”, service offering. Get this, voicemail-to-email! Wow! Welcome to 2002 Bell!

Ok, so their a little slow. I can accept that. In fact I probably wouldn’t even have paid any special attention to the article if it wasn’t for the fact that Mark Langton, a spokesman for the company was actually quoted saying “There’s still innovation being done here,”.

I really hope he didn’t say that with a straight face. They rip off an idea that has been in use by VoIP providers for years and then claim Bell is the innovator. One thing they didn’t borrow from VoIP, the price. The Bell service costs anywhere from $3 to $13 extra.

Next Bell will hold a press conference and tell us they invented the internet. I can see Mark explaining it now, “it’s like a series of tubes…”

[official press release]  or [CBC story]