Blang!

If anyone had doubts about the impact Google is having on the mobile space, the Mobile World Congress (MWC) should have put those doubts to rest.

Ad revenue from Android phones are the fastest growing segment of the mobile ad space and mobile carriers are starting to make some disturbing pronouncements such as Vodafone chief Vittorio Colao declaring that they may start to charge search engines for access to their network. Cell phone carriers are true “bellheads“. They just can’t fathom a network where they don’t control every aspect of it. I’m just dieing to see what happens when Vodafone cuts off their customers from Google (”What? Your network doesn’t have ‘The Internet’?!?!).

But I digress. The point of this post is that even though the iPhone still gets all the media attention, Google’s Android is the one gaining market share and making the most waves in telecom circles.

And it won’t stop there. Android’s openness is poised to make it the most disruptive technology this decade. Unlike the iPhone which only runs on devices developed, sanctioned and released by Apple, Android can run on anything. Soon it’ll be popping up not only on phones, but netbooks, laptops, TVs, desk phones and absolutely anything that device manufactures want to put an interface on.

Android won’t just challenge the smart phone market, but it has the potential to make inroads into every consumer technology out there; tipping over everyone’s apple cart as it goes.

As predicted, the government mismanagement of the technology portfolio is turning into a disaster that just keeps on giving. Today, the first lawsuits was filed. To my surprise, it was one of the new entrants, Public Mobile who launched the first lawsuit (I expected it to be one of the incumbents).

Public Mobile is complaining loudly that granting Globe Alive a one-time exception to the foreign ownership rules puts it at a major competitive disadvantage. No kidding. One company can draw on a massive pool of foreign investment capital, and the rest can’t. It’s completely unfair.

Not only unfair, but bad for Canada. Since the rest of the new entrants didn’t have access to as foreign capital, they weren’t able to bid as high as they would have or buy as much spectrum as they might have to become significant national competitors.

How much higher would the bidding have gone? How much money did the Conservatives throw away at the auction by not allowing more bidders? Given that the auction went into the billions, it’s a safe bet that Canada is out “billions”. A disaster and a scandal of epic proportions.

Thank goodness parliament prorogued or the Conservatives might have to answer for their actions.

Time and again, the Conservative government has demonstrated it is completely clueless when it comes to technology policy.

Case in point, one of the first things the Conservatives did was to ignore recommendations to lift foreign ownership restrictions in the telcom sector. That recommendation was originally in a report commissioned by the Liberals so instead of following it, they commissioned their own report which came to the same conclusion.

Having received the same recommendation from both Liberal and Conservative reports, they did the only logical thing and ignored(?) them both…

Instead, the Conservatives opted to plough head-on into “free” market disaster.

Foreign ownership can be a political hot-button in Canada so the Conservatives attempted to duck the issue by pressuring Industry Canada to approve the ownership structure of Globalive despite the fact it clearly didn’t meet the requirements.

This back-door decision making conveniently avoided the inevitable public discussion of foreign ownership policy and neatly ducked any political fallout. Problem avoided. Or so they thought…

Industry Canada can get away with making their decision in relative secrecy but the CRTC can not. The CRTC must issue its decisions publicly along with the accompanying rational and background information. So, faced with a complaint from the incumbent cell phone carriers, the CRTC had no choice but to conclude (correctly) that Globalive does not meet the ownership restrictions.

In the mean time, Globalive has spent hundreds of millions on spectrum and infrastructure.

So the government choices are now this:

1) Overrule the CRTC (again) resulting in:

a) A public dressing down of Industry Canada (for approving Globalive in the first place) and the CRTC (for not going along with the program).

b) A government admission that ignoring the recommendations to lift foreign ownership restrictions was bungling of the highest order.

c) A lawsuit by the incumbent telcoms (which they will win. After all, even if the Conservatives overrule the CRTC, Canadian law still states they must be Canadian owned).

2) Let the CRTC ruling stand resulting in:

a) A public dressing down of Industry Canada (for approving Globalive in the first place) and the CRTC (for not going along with the program).

b) A lawsuit by Globalive to recover their investment plus damages, a figure that could approach 1 Billion.

c) No real competition in the near future.

3) Change the law on foreign ownership resulting in:

a) See all above.

What a disaster. I can hardly wait to see what they do next.

Yes it works! (I was as surprised as anyone)

It didn’t take me long to get it working but google returns a lot of posts with not so good information so here is the documentation on my experience.

In recent posts I’ve been lamenting the lack of the “perfect device” (one that’s the size of a phone but has capabilities of laptop, including docking to a mouse, keyboard & monitor). I’ve also debated which of the major companies would win this battle (Microsoft, Google, RIM, or Apple). I’m ready to declare a victor.

And the winner is (or will be); Google Andriod!

Even though Andriod has yet to have any major devices make it to market, the momentum is now unmistakable. Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung have phones released or in the works; but more importantly, so do companies like Acer (who just announced that they are working on several Andriod devices) and HP. That’s the critical cross-over that will win this fight. The openness of Andriod means it will dominate the vast majority of devices ending the iPhone and Blackberry dominance.

The only things standing in the way is to crack the Telcom dominance over wireless data.

If it wasn’t already obvious how badly Canada needs to lift it’s foreign ownership rules, this week, the Toronto Star is reporting that Telus has demanded that the CRTC re-examine how much foreign ownership there really is in new wireless entrant Globealive.

The ILEC’s know that there is no Canadian owned company that could afford to build a new wireless network big enough to compete and that’s why Telus is raising a red flag over Globalive. It well knows that no foreign company would pour hundreds of millions of dollars into building a wireless network it doesn’t own and my hunch is that Telus is right. There is something fishy going on there and the government should do something about it. It’s just that what I think the government should do isn’t what Telus wants.

Lets lift these ridiculous foreign ownership restrictions once and for all and get on with finally building a better, more cost effective network. If Globalive really is pulling a fast one with foreign money, then it isn’t fair to the other new wireless entrants who are playing by a stricter set of rules.

It’s also worth noting that the Canadian wireless spectrum auction that generated so much more money than expected, did so because foreign companies bid the prices up so high. If Canada really wants to get “fair market value” for it’s wireless spectrum, then by definition it needs to have a fair market. That means a market that isn’t artificially restricted by outdated ownership rules and where competition drives prices down so us Canadians get to use our public airwaves at a reasonable price.

According to this Globe and Mail story, the CRTC is going to order the telcoms to finally fix the cellular 911 network.

Unfortunately this exposes just what a sad joke the CRTC has become. They have known about this problem for years and they were warned that there would be deaths if something wasn’t done. It was obvious.

Result? Deaths. There have been at least three recent incidents where location determination of cell callers could have saved lives.

But the CRTC allowed the PSAPs and the ILECs to waste more than two years on a non-solution for VOIP location determination while doing nothing about wireless. And now that people are actually dieing the CRTC finally decides it should do something. What a joke. The people at the CRTC that have allowed this to transpire should loose their jobs.

Don’t get me wrong, VOIP location determination is needed but it pales in importance to wireless. More than 50% of calls to 911 come from cell phones while VOIP calls are less than 1% (it’s actually so small no statistics are kept). Furthermore, there are “off-the-shelf” solutions for wireless location determination. Nothing like that exists for VOIP. And let us not forget that the cell companies have been charging “911 access” fees which they just pocket instead of actually using them to implement proper 911 systems.

Hot on the heels of my posting on the future of mobile devices comes a story on Venture Beat describing how they got the Google operating system Andriod running on an ASUS netbook.

Android’s Linux core seems to be giving it an early advantage due to Linux’s easy portability and vast hardware support. The article doesn’t mention it but some netbooks have support for 3G sim cards which just makes compelte sense.

I want to point out that a 3G enabled netbook running Android is still not the dream device I’m looking for but it’s getting close. The essential component of the dream device is the hardware. It must be cell phone sized but when docked, become a fully functional workstation (keyboard, mouse, full sized monitor etc.)

Netbooks aren’t the hardware solution. he netbooks are really just crappy laptops. Too big to carry around and with few of the “mobile” featuers that a smart phone would have.

They key aspect of the article is the discussion about how many manufacturers see Andriod as a replacement operating system to Microsoft based systems.

Finally someone in the media has looked beyond the hype about VOIP and 911 and done a decent job of assessing Canada’s entire 911 system. This story in The Globe & Mail finally seems to have grasped the reality that cell phones are a far more serious threat to the 911 system than VOIP will ever be.

While I fault the article for glossing over the VOIP location problem (it’s far more expensive and complicated than the cell phone problem), it does a good job of pointing out that the cell industry has a solution available for $50 million, a drop in the bucket compared to overall revenue and far less than the estimated $150 million the cell phone providers charge (and mostly pocket) for 911 access fees.

It is unbelievable that cell providers are allowed to collect and pocket $150 million in 911 access fees (over and above the profits they already make on wireless) while a ready made, $50 million solution exists that could save lives!

Rogers, Bell, MTS, and Telus should be ashamed.

Sometimes political posturing is so blatant that it just makes you cringe. When Telus and Bell announced they were going to start charging for incoming text messages, Industry Minister Jim Prentence decided it was time to make a move and stand up for the consumer.

Frankly it’s just too much to take.

This is the same Jim Prentice who’s government, just months earlier overruled the CRTC and ordered it to stop regulating prices on wireline phone service.

This the same Jim Prentice that just introduced Bill C-61 (known as the “Canadian DMCA”). A copyright bill written after consulting only with large (mostly U.S. owned) media companies and then trotted out as “striking a balance” on copyright. How do you strike a balance when you only consult with one side?

Jim Prentice is Industry Minister in a Conservative government and everyone knows what Conservatives stand for and it’s not consumers. They fight for big business, tax cuts, cuts to social spending, Christian family values etc. etc. We all know this because it’s printed right in their election platform.

So when they so transparently try and buy votes with these appeals to the people can we really do anything except scoff?

Were we actually supposed to take Jim seriously when he announced that he was going to express his concern on this issue? What exactly was he going to threaten? Price Regulation for cell phones? Ha!

So colour me surprised that after consulting with the head of both Telus and Bell, Jim decided he wouldn’t take any action.

I can’t help but imagine they sat around smoking cigars and swilling 10 year old scotch while smacking each other on the back and laughing how they’ve all “balanced” the rights of the consumer.

Thanks again for looking out for us Jim.