TM Editorial

Entering the IP JungleIn this issue of Telemanagement you will find . . . A titan of cinema developing new-age video conferencing. A web auction site offering worldwide long distance. A Canadian university experimenting in high-fidelity concerts distributed worldwide. A Smith’s Falls VoIP startup that claims to offer more advanced PBX technology than the giants. What you see here is IP in action. The new technology’s greatest strength lies in making it possible to create innovative applications with minimum overhead and capital. The media hype has it that this means "convergence." Phone, cable, and other suppliers, we are told, are all going to be offering us the same set of services. But what we actually see is organizations of every type imaginable providing a wide variety of telephony services, many of which we never heard of before. This is not convergence, it’s diversification. Increasingly, consumers-and particularly young consumers-are leading the way, as with the iPod-cellphone combination also announced last month. But for business communications too, there are more products, more suppliers, and more choices. And that means more responsibility for the managers who have to choose. No wonder that Henry Dortmans, in this month’s "On the Line" column (p. 19), reports a trend toward strengthening corporate networking staffs. There’d better be such a trend, or else Canadian business will be left behind. Wireless Number Portability Needed Without DelayA Canadian company that wants to switch to a new cellular provider pays a heavy price. Every cellphone user must be issued a new number-an onerous task for technology pro-fessionals charged with managing the change. And all the effort put into making staffers’ cellphone numbers widely known goes up in smoke. That’s Janice Vickery’s situation. She is the telecom analyst for a Calgary corporation that could benefit from the freedom to move users from one carrier to another. The carrier she’d likely leave behind, Bell Mobility, has a U.S. roaming policy that is harsh compared to that of Telus Mobility. Technology to transfer the numbers from one carrier to another ("number portability") has been available for some time, but not across the board in Canada. Without number portability, the move would be a management nightmare. Vickery has too many users for the process to be anything less than daunting. Canada’s cellular carriers now say they will implement number portability, but it will take two years. The industry would be wise to speed things up. Quick action would help prove that it understands what customers want: the right to choose a carrier based on service, not degrees of inconvenience. Meanwhile, Bell should stop levying U.S. roaming charges for calls made in Canada. Number portability is coming, so customers will be able to buy elsewhere with less trouble. Bell’s unfair roaming guidelines could put it at a competitive disadvantage.

TM Editorial

News | 10/03/2005 4:00 am EDT

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