Canadian ‘tale of two internets,’ as 25% get online wirelessly: Deloitte

The number of Canadians who get their internet access wirelessly — either through mobile connections or fixed wireless service — will reach 25 per cent in 2018, according to Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd.’s predictions for the upcoming year, released Tuesday. “It’s kind of an invisible group,” said Deloitte’s director of technology, media and telecommunications research Duncan Stewart in a phone interview. Those individuals tend to be younger, from 18 to 34, lower-income, and rural, and going without a wireline connection means they’re getting slower speeds, and have significantly lower data caps, he added. “My phrase for this is that they’re sipping through a straw,” Stewart said. “There is really a tale of two internets in Canada. There are people who are sitting there with nice fat pipes coming into their homes, and they are very, very much part of the 21st century digital economy.” On the other hand, the quarter of Canadians who are online but have no wireline connection “are not enjoying the same speeds. They don’t have the same ability to do cord-cutting. They will not have the same ability to access the cloud. They will not have the ability to create their own content and upload it.” Having a quarter of Canadians who “are not on the information superhighway, they’re on the information dirt road, is probably not a good thing from a public policy perspective,” Stewart said. The Deloitte data doesn’t break the predictions into the number of Canadians on each type of service. The 25 per cent figure for the number of Canadians without wireline service was based on Deloitte’s global survey of seven countries, conducted between August and October this year, with a Canadian sample size of 1,090. The margin of error was plus or minus three per cent, Stewart said. A Tuesday press release highlighting the data noted that the percentage of internet-connected individuals in North America who rely on wireless connections, which is 20 per cent, could reach 30 to 40 per cent by 2022, “largely through new mmWave 5G wireless technologies.” But currently — with wireless substitution due to 5G speeds still off in the future — affordability and access are among the reasons Canadians lack wireline connections. While some of that 25 per cent may in live in remote and rural areas where a wireline connection is simply not available, others may not be able to afford both a wireless and wireline connection and are choosing to prioritize their smartphone, he said. Deloitte’s global report, which Stewart co-wrote, also touched on future innovation in smartphones, noting that many of those innovations won’t be immediately apparent to the eye. Instead, they include new features like chips with artificial intelligence and machine learning, which enable better-quality photos and features like 360 video. “So the physical camera isn’t really that different, but the chips and the software and the capability will make pictures that literally at a glance, you would say, ‘that’s a better picture’,” he said. “So just because the phone from the outside doesn’t look any better, doesn’t mean, in my view, that consumers won’t keep buying them, and won’t keep paying more.” The growth of machine learning was another of Deloitte’s predictions for 2018. Stewart noted that what’s significant for wireless providers is that machine learning that is found “on the edge of the networks and in mobile devices and on sensors … actually shifts traffic. Instead of me having to send an entire image over the cloud, over the network, to a data centre far, far away and then have them send the result back, if I can pre-process or even completely do the machine learning onboard my device, that reduces network traffic for machine learning purposes.” An example of that is technology in the phone itself being able to recognize individuals in pictures and tag them instead of needing to transmit the photo itself for tagging. That alone can save a megabyte or two, he said. The global report also predicts that the overall average selling price of a phone will rise again in 2018, after falling between 2012 and 2015, and starting to increase again in 2016 and continuing through 2017. The predictions also said that 15 million Canadians will use augmented reality (AR) technology, though half of that activity will be focused on applications like photo filters that allow people to add special effects to their selfies. “And there’s nothing wrong with that,” Stewart said, noting that the first computer people had in their homes allowed them to play the early video game Pong. “Frequently, technology uses gaming and seemingly trivial applications as a gateway to the larger mass market acceptance,” he said. Other AR applications will be more practical, like apps that allow customers to determine whether furniture will fit in their home, he noted. — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca editing by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca

Canadian ‘tale of two internets,’ as 25% get online wirelessly: Deloitte

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