Businesses need break to meet digital report deadline

Industry minister Tony Clement gave the public eight weeks to submit opinions on the issue to stimulate a debate. However, as late as Wednesday only a handful of organizations had filed submissions, and none were from the biggest information, technology and communications companies who would be at the centre of any strategy.

The latest submissions

One of the latest submissions was from Saskatchewan’s phone company, SaskTel, which says any digital strategy should only focus on rural and remote parts of the country, because there’s enough competition in urban Canada to assure high speed Internet access.

While Ottawa has injected money for specific regions, that “has not resulted in the continuous growth of broadband in rural areas,” the report says. In fact it dismisses the Harper government’s current program of injecting $225 million to improve broadband access rural and remote areas as “inadequate.”

Instead, fees from spectrum auctions should finance rural and remote broadband programs, says the utility,as suggested by a recent Senate report. (The last spectrum auction raised over $4 billion dollars. The next auction, for spectrum in the 700 Mhz range, will likely be held in 2012.)

SaskTel also dismisses any hope that foreign telecom companies will invest in rural areas. At the same time it complains that despite the Harper government’s 2006 directive to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to rely on market forces when possible, new forms of regulation are being worked on.

For its part, Telus Corp., the incumbent phone company in B.C. and Alberta, said Ottawa “should not be diverted by misleading studies which attempt to make Canada appear to be a laggard” in telecommunications. The country show “relatively good performance in terms of network readiness,” it says, given that Canada has the highest household broadband penetration among G8 nations.

Also on Friday, Microsoft Canada submitted 20 recommendations around which a digital economy strategy could be created, including expanding research and development incentives for the information and communication technology (ICT) industries. “Canadian firms consistently invest less in ICT than their competitors in other developed markets,” the submission notes, citing figures from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “In fact, Canadian ICT investment severely lags that of the United States and other economies like Great Britain and Sweden, and is trending downward.”

The software company also calls on Ottawa to identify “competing or unnecessary obligations” that create barriers to the seamless use of digital technologies across different types of networks. This is particularly of concern in cloud computing where a technology like VoIP can raise “challenging questions” about the application of regulatory rules to online services, Microsoft said.