TORONTO – Canada may not be the “ideal” mobile nation, but we’ve come a long way in the last two years, technology consultant and blogger Tom Purves told mobile developers at the FITC Mobile conference in Toronto.
The mobile industry in Canada has seen “something like progress” since 2007 he said, and while mobile penetration and affordability are still low, Purves said the availability of “leading” devices and network speed have helped to increase Canada’s international profile.
“In April 2007, Canada had some of the worst data rates in the world”, Purves said in his standing-room only presentation. “And it was dominated by on-deck content and limited accessibility to open content and open services.”
So what’s changed?
According to Purves, the “icebreakers” were the introduction of the Apple iPhone to Canada via Rogers, the arrival of 3G, and data plans that charged $30 for 6GB.
Of course, last summer’s wireless auction spectrum helped too, but Purves was critical of the way the government chose to spend the approximately $4B that it raised.
“In retrospect, charging the (wireless) industry a $4B tax on expansion feels like a strange way to help lower your cell phone bill”, he said, suggesting that funding mobile startups, mobile content creation, and reimbursing wireless carriers with tax credits for mobile capital expenditures would have better served the nascent mobile industry.
Despite these developments, Canada still ranks 129th out of 270 countries for mobile penetration, trailing well behind countries such as the U.S., Australia, the U.K. and Spain, according to 2008 data from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
“The reasons for this are entirely historical”, Purves told Cartt.ca in an interview after his presentation. “The industry has lagged in mobile adoption, and the huge orders of magnitude in effective pricing per bit is staggering.”
He also said that charging for voice minutes in a world of mobile broadband “doesn’t make any sense”. Noting that a standard GSP voice band requires only 12.2 kpps, Purves said that hypothetically, that’s now less than 0.01% of a phone’s available bandwidth.
“How long can this traditional but tiny little bit-stream continue to support 80% of the carrier’s revenue?” he asked.
He also likened the cell phone industry to the video rental industry, referring to them as “temporary” industries as consumers migrate towards smart phones that offer more than just talk and text.
But Canada does have “leapfrog potential”, Purves said. Unlike in 2007, we now have fast networks, the “best” devices (such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm and mobile rocket sticks, to name a few), and more competition.
“Canada also has great mobile development and a startup community near very large global markets”, he added.
However, high costs remain and Purves called the length of the average consumer wireless contract and roaming pricing “outrageous”. He also stressed the need for network neutrality, pricing transparency, more spectrum, and a review of foreign ownership.
“Telcos have come a long way, but they still need to get that technology out there, and equally as important, teach consumers how to use it. There is a lot of innovation possible in voice – just look at Google Voice.”
Google Voice, launched last March and currently available only in the U.S., allows users to select a single phone number and have incoming calls answered by any, all, or none of the user’s configured phones. Received calls may be moved between configured telephones during a call, while outbound calls may be placed to domestic and international destinations from any of a user’s configured telephones, or from a web-based application.
The service is configured and maintained by the user in a web-based application, styled after Google’s e-mail service, Gmail.
