A hodge-podge of unconnected facts and ideas. The writer bounces like a pinball between competing assertions.
He understands the difficulties caused by regulators, but he ignores the history that created both them, and the monopoly they were designed to oversee. He doesn't understand (or at least doesn't address) that transition from a monopoly to a duopoly was just pissing in the soup. It didn't create a competitive environment, and it's not in the regulator's charter to do so: that's a political and legal construction. If we want an environment where providers can rise to strength based on their ability to give end-users what they want, we can't look to regulators to provide it: that requires policy change.
He correctly questions the statistical method of the OECD's report on broadband (consistent with the need to question any statistic):
"The principal metric used by OECD to rank broadband penetration is broadband lines per 100 people, which is at best misleading and at worst meaningless. Because it doesn't separate business and residential users and fails to account for differences in household composition, the OECD ranking -- Canada 10th and the United States 15th -- is highly suspect.
Then what does he do? He jumps to "a recent report": "As for the quality of Canadian connectivity, a recent report found the average download speed for Canada was 4.2 megabits a second, compared to 3.2 Mbps for France. Technology is advancing quickly and speeds of 200 Mbps and faster will soon be commonplace. Indeed, there are pockets in Canada where such services already exist."
What report? Using what statistical method? Does he think 200 Mbps is the ne plus ultra of throughput?
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It's not worth our time to list the article's other inconsistencies and logical failures, of which there are many. A quick scan of the author's material elsewhere doesn't reveal any obvious bias, so maybe he's just putting in a word for legacy monopolists.
There's a hint of xenophobia, protectionism and incumbent apologetics in his complaint about "... a lot of chutzpah for a foreign investor for whom Industry Minister Tony Clement bent the rules." The contradictions in his approach seem to escape him. Is he complaining about the lack of a truly competitive environment, such that a minister had to make an "exception"? What does it say about status quo when a minister must override the regulator? That is, when the rules must be broken to create competition?
As for the author's poorly-nested claim that incumbents like Bell and Telus would best serve Canadians, full stop. There's a lot of ugly history that's been ignored here.
The article serves readers very poorly. It's a wreck.
Jim |
