This monopole cell tower antenna just showed up one day in the backyard of this Kirkland, PQ resident.

Rogers Communications installed a 49-foot monopole cellular antenna in the backyard of a Kirkland, Que. resident earlier this year, but the only signals being transmitted are discussions over its fate at town hall.

Residents were furious when a neighbor leased out a portion of a residential backyard to Rogers, who claims the small cube antenna mounted on the pole will improve cell reception in the immediate area. Ever since Stop the Cap! first covered this story earlier this year, local officials have been flummoxed about what they can do about the antenna, which is currently non-operational.

“For now (there is) no resolution, but talks are progressing,” Kirkland’s director general Joe Sanalitro told The West Island Gazette. “We are demanding it come down.”

Rogers and Kirkland officials have been meeting about the antenna, which has generated considerable interest and complaints over whether the company used a zoning loophole to sneak the antenna into the neighborhood.

If allowed to stand, residents fear Rogers and other cell companies could offer cash incentives to other homeowners to erect similar towers, increasing visual pollution.

Industry Canada rules state towers less than 15 meters are excluded from municipal notification rules and do not require permits to install.  Rogers was evidently aware of this rule — its Kirkland antenna tops out at 14.5 meters, just shy of the height limit.

“Somehow in the last 100 years, every time there is a problem of getting more spectrum, there is a technology that comes along that solves that problem. Every two and a half years, every spectrum crisis has gotten solved, and that’s going to keep happening. We already know today what the solutions are for the next 50 years.” — Martin Cooper, inventor of the portable cell phone

Despite the fear-mongering by North America’s wireless phone companies that a spectrum crisis is at hand — one that threatens the viability of wireless communications across the continent, some of the most prominent industry veterans dispute the public policy agenda of phone companies like AT&T, Verizon, Bell, and Rogers.

Martin Cooper ought to know.  He invented the portable cell phone, and remains involved in the wireless industry today.  Cooper shrugs off cries of spectrum shortages as a problem well-managed by technological innovation.  In fact, he’s credited for Cooper’s Law: The ability to transmit different radio communications at one time and in the same place has grown with the same pace since Guglielmo Marconi’s first transmissions in 1895. The number of such communications being theoretically possible has doubled every 30 months, from then, for 104 years.

National Public Radio looks back at the earliest car phones, which weighed 80 pounds and operated with vacuum tubes. Innovation, improved technology, and lower pricing turned an invention for the rich and powerful into a device more than 300,000,000 North Americans own and use today. (April 2012) (3 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

A traditional car phone from the 1960s.

The earliest cell phones have been around since the 1940s.  St. Louis was the first city in the United States to get Mobile Telephone Service (MTS).  It worked on three analog radio channels and required an operator to make calls on the customer’s behalf. By 1964, direct dialing from car phones became possible with Improved Mobile Telephone Service (IMTS), which also increased the number of radio channels available for calls.

In the 1970s, popular television shows frequently showed high-flyers and private detectives with traditional looking phones installed in their cars.  But the service was obscenely expensive.  The equipment set customers back $2-4,000 or was leased for around $120 a month.  Local calls ran $0.70-1.20 per minute.  That was when a nice home was priced at $27,000, a new car was under $4,000, gas was $0.55/gallon, and a first run movie ticket was priced at $1.75.

With many cities maintaining fewer than a dozen radio channels for the service, only a handful of customers could make or receive calls at a time.  The first “spectrum crisis” arrived by the late 1970s, when car phones became the status symbol of the rich and powerful (the middle class had pagers). Customers found they couldn’t make or receive calls because the frequencies were all tied up.  Some cities even rationed service by maintaining waiting lists, not allowing new customers to have the technology until an existing one dropped their account.

Instead of demanding deregulation and warning of wireless doomsday, the wireless industry innovated its way out of the era of MTS altogether, switching instead to a “cellular” approach developed in part by the Bell System.

In the 1970s, when the first cell phone “spectrum crisis” erupted, the Bell System innovated its way out the the dilemma without running to Congress demanding sweeping deregulation.  This documentary, produced by the Bell System, explores AMPS — analog cell phone service, and how it transformed Chicago’s mobile telephone landscape back in 1979.  (9 minutes)

“Arguing that the nation could run out of spectrum is like saying it was going to run out of a color.” David P. Reed, one of the original architects of the Internet

Instead of one caller tying up a single IMTS radio frequency capable of reaching across an entire city, the Bell System deployed lower-powered transmitters in a series of hexagonal “cells.”  Each cell only served callers within a much smaller geographic area.  As a customer traveled between cells, the system would hand the call off to the next cell in turn and so on — all transparently to the caller.  Because of the reduced coverage area, cell towers in a city could operate on the same frequencies without creating interference problems, opening up the system to many more customers and more calls.

Inventor Martin Cooper holds one of the first portable mobile phones

In Chicago, Bell’s IMTS system only supported around a dozen callers at the same time. In 1977, the phone company built a test cellular network it dubbed “AMPS,” for Advanced Mobile Phone System.  AMPS technology was familiar to many early cell phone users.  It was more popularly known as “analog” service, and while it could still only handle one conversation at a time on each frequency, the system supported better call handling and many more users than earlier wireless phone technology.  By 1979, Bell had 1,300 customers using their test system in Chicago.

AMPS considerably eased the “spectrum crunch” earlier systems found challenging, and subsequent upgrades to digital technology dramatically increased the number of calls each tower could handle and allowed providers to slash pricing, which fueled the spectacular growth of the wireless marketplace.

Yesterday it was voice call congestion, today it is a “tidal wave” of wireless data.  But inventors like Cooper believe the solution is the same: engineering innovation.

“Somehow in the last 100 years, every time there is a problem of getting more spectrum, there is a technology that comes along that solves that problem,” Cooper told the New York Times. “Every two and a half years, every spectrum crisis has gotten solved, and that’s going to keep happening. We already know today what the solutions are for the next 50 years.”

Cooper believes in the cellular approach to wireless communications.  Dividing up today’s geographic cells into even smaller cells could vastly expand network capacity just like AMPS did for Windy City residents in the late 1970s. Using especially directional antennas focused on different service areas, placing new cell towers, innovating further with tiny neighborhood antennas mounted on telephone poles, or building out Wi-Fi networks can all manage the data capacity “crisis” says Cooper.

New technology also allows cell signals to co-exist, even on the same or adjacent frequencies, without creating interference problems. All it takes is a willingness to invest in the technology and deploy it across signal-congested urban areas.

Unfortunately, network engineers are not often responsible for the business decisions or public policy agendas of the nation’s largest wireless companies who are using the “spectrum crisis” to argue for increased deregulation and demanding additional radio spectrum which, in some cases, could be locked up by companies to make sure nobody else can use them.

The New York Times offers this easy-to-follow primer on wireless spectrum and why it matters (or not) in the current climate of explosive growth in mobile data traffic.  (3 minutes)

“Their primary interest is not necessarily in making spectrum available, or in making wireless performance better. They want to make money.” — David S. Isenberg, veteran researcher, AT&T Labs

Innovation, not wholesale deregulation, allowed the Bell System to solve the spectrum crisis of the 1970s by creating today's "cell system" that can re-use radio frequencies in adjacent areas to handle more wireless traffic.

Spectrum auctions bring billions to federal coffers, but actually deliver a hidden tax to cell phone customers who ultimately pay for the winning bids priced into their monthly bills.  It also makes it prohibitively expensive for a new player to enter the market.  Already facing enormous network construction costs, any new entrant would then face the crushing prospect of outbidding AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Bell or Rogers for the frequencies essential for operation.

As the New York Times writes:

When a company gets the license for a band of radio waves, it has the exclusive rights to use it. Once a company owns it, competitors can’t have it.

Mr. Reed said the carriers haven’t advocated for the newer technologies because they want to retain their monopolies.

Cooper advocates a new regulatory approach at the Federal Communications Commission — one that mandates wireless phone companies start using today’s technology to amplify their networks.

Cooper points to one example: the smart antenna.

Smart antennas direct cell towers to focus their transmission energy towards the specific devices connected to it.  If a customer was using their phone from the southern end of the cell tower’s coverage area, why direct signal energy to the north, where it gets wasted?  New LTE networks support smart antenna technology, but carriers have generally avoided investing in upgrading towers to support the new technology, expected to be commonplace inside new wireless devices within two years.

T-Mobile calls these technology solutions “Band-Aids” that won’t address the company’s demand for more frequencies to manage its network.  But that kind of thinking applied to the mobile phone world of the 1970s would have maintained the exorbitantly expensive IMTS technology discarded decades ago, since replaced by innovation that made more efficient use of the spectrum already on hand.  That innovation also transformed wireless phones from a tool (or toy) for the very wealthy to an affordable success story that now threatens the traditional wired phone network in ways the Bell System could have never envisioned.

It’s A Whole New System: AT&T and other wireless phone companies might want to learn the lesson the Bell System was trying to teach their employees back in 1979: Meet Change With Change.  This company-produced video implores the phone company to do more than the same old thing.  No, this video is not “PM Magazine.”  It is about innovation and actually listening to what customers want. With apologies to Mama Cass Elliot, there was indeed a New World Coming — the breakup of the Bell System just five years later.  Don’t miss the diabetic-coma-inducing, sugary-sweet jingle at the end.  Then reach for a can of Tab.  (10 minutes)

This nearly 15 meter monopole cell tower antenna just showed up one day in the backyard of this Kirkland, PQ resident, who is presumably being compensated up to $200 a month as Rogers' newest cell tower landlord.

Rogers Communications has found a solution to difficult zoning laws and cell tower controversy — find a homeowner willing to accept around $200 a month to host a (relatively) short cell tower antenna in their backyard, skirting the usual dragged-out cell tower siting consultations most local communities have enacted to control visual pollution.

A wealthy neighborhood in the community of Kirkland, a city of 20,000 near Montreal, discovered Rogers’ ingenuity for themselves when a just-under-50-foot monopole antenna suddenly appeared in the backyard of a home on Acres Street.

The neighbors are outraged. But Rogers says everything they did erecting the tower with no prior notice was done by the book.

That book, in the form of Industry Canada regulations, says Rogers doesn’t need to endure lengthy zoning hearings or a town-wide consultation process.  Rogers agrees, stating they can erect antennas of less than 15 meters at their pleasure — no consultation required.

Rogers spokesperson Stephanie Jerrold said Industry Canada regulations are clear: “The protocol says that if it’s a tower that measures under 15 meters, no public consultation is needed,” she said.

That may be true, but the loophole did nothing to appease dozens of nearby residents living in homes valued at $400,000 from raising a ruckus with local officials.  A petition has been submitted to city hall demanding Rogers remove the antenna.  Residents expressed concerns about their health and property values with a cell tower in their midst.

Rogers foreshadowed their intent last fall when they mailed letters to homeowners looking for someone to host the new antenna, offering around $200 a month to any takers. Evidently there was one — the resident at 75 Acres St.

City officials are pondering what to do about the new tower. They did not approve a work permit for its placement, which may provide leverage against Rogers, but no one knows for sure.

Thus far, Industry Canada wants to remain more than 15 meters away from the debate.  A spokesman for the agency, Antoine Quellon, told the West Island Gazette:

“The company must consult with the local community as required and address relevant concerns. It must also satisfy Industry Canada’s general and technical requirements, including Health Canada’s Safety Code 6, aeronautical safety, interference protection and environmental requirements. Under rare circumstances where an agreeable solution for a site is not possible, Industry Canada may need to make a determination based on the facts presented.”

CBC in Montreal covered the Kirkland controversy and talked with the neighbors about the new 50 foot pole owned by Rogers Communications.  (2 minutes)

Canadian cable, phone, and satellite providers have done a better job stymieing would-be “cord-cutters” than their counterparts further south in the United States.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s (CRTC) annual report on the country’s telecom companies shows all of them remain exceptionally profitable, keeping pay TV customers far more effectively than American providers. Total revenues climbed from $12.5 billion to $13.5 billion in just one year, as price hikes, Internet Overcharging schemes like usage-based billing, and lack of competition continue to takes its toll on Canadian wallets.

The biggest winners were the biggest telecom companies in Canada — Rogers Communications, Bell Canada (BCE), and Shaw Communications, which all saw profits soar 8.2% to $11 billion.  Costs increased about 10.7% in 2011, fueled by network upgrades and rampant hikes in programming costs — an interesting state of affairs considering Rogers and Bell own or control a substantial number of the programmers demanding higher payments.  Most of those increases were passed on to customers in the form of rate hikes.

Although Canadians are increasingly interested in streaming online video, virtually every major Internet Service Provider in the country has effectively prevented customers from dropping cable television service in favor of broadband-only access.  They manage it with usage caps and usage billing on their broadband products.  With streamed video accounting for a substantial drain on customers’ monthly usage allowances, Canadians are unlikely to cancel cable TV in favor of watching all of their favorite shows online.

In fact, the number of Canadian households that subscribed to a cable company’s basic television service actually increased by 2.8% in 2011 to reach 8.5 million.  Experts say the country’s transition to digital over the air television may account for some of that increase, but a few high broadband bills with overlimit fees for “excessive Internet use” can effectively drive online video fans back to traditional cable TV as well.

Satellite television in Canada remained flat,  with a virtually unchanged 2.9 million Canadians relying on Bell and Shaw satellite service for television entertainment.

But everyone is paying more to watch.

In 2011, cable companies paid $2.1 billion in wholesale fees to the pay and specialty services they distribute, an increase of 10.2% over the $1.9 billion paid the previous year. The fees paid by satellite companies rose by 2.8% in one year, going from $894.4 million to $919 million.

That leaves vertically and horizontally-integrated conglomerates like Bell in the perfect position to extract higher programming payments.  Those costs are passed down to Canadian consumers and blamed on “greedy programmers,” despite the fact those programmers are owned in part or outright by Bell.

A Rogers retail rental store

Rogers is also well-suited to remain a part of the Canadian entertainment experience.  The company owns cable systems, wireless phone networks, programmers, and even home video stores. However Stop the Cap! reader Alex notes Rogers has been closing a number of those video stores over the past few months.

“This gives customers one less choice for renting movies, basically forcing them to use Rogers On Demand instead,” writes Alex.

Rogers On Demand comes with a higher price, too.  In-store rentals from Rogers are priced at 2 for $9 or 3 for $15.  A recent look at Rogers’ video on demand website, Rogers Anyplace TV, shows most movie titles priced at $4.99 each.  With Rogers closing 40 percent of their retail rental outlets, movie fans have had fewer competitive choices for movie rentals.

One potential new contender coming to Canada – kiosk video rentals.  Although services like Redbox are now commonplace in the States, they are virtually unknown in the north.  Jim Gormley, former owner of Jumbo Video is back with Planet DVD.  With just 2% of Canadians renting movies from kiosks, Gormley believes there is plenty of room to grow, especially as Rogers scales back its video rental business.

Planet DVD has a pilot project running with supermarket chain Sobeys to place kiosks in front of nine store locations.  The first kiosk was erected in early March in front of a Sobeys store in Mississauga, Ont.

A new release at a Planet DVD kiosk is priced at $3 for a one-day rental.  That’s less than what most video stores charge, but more than double what Americans pay at a Redbox kiosk.

If you want better Canadian broadband with fewer tricks and traps and live in Ontario or Quebec: put the house up for sale, pack up your things, and head west.

Canada’s heavily metered and capped broadband is ubiquitous in the country’s two most-populated provinces where a convenient duopoly of Bell and Rogers in Ontario and Bell and Videotron in Quebec control the vast majority of the broadband market.  But cross west into Saskatchewan and things start to look a lot better.

Canadians telecommunications consultancy The Seaboard Group praised SaskTel, the provincial phone company, for refusing to slap usage caps on its customers.  SaskTel does not deliver the cheapest Internet access by any means, but the company is investing heavily in fiber optic upgrades to turn the page on aging copper wire infrastructure.  Stringing fiber through Regina, Saskatoon and beyond may seem counterintuitive to other providers.  Saskatchewan, one of Canada’s “prairie provinces,” is hardly packed with people.  With more than 20 million Canadians living in Ontario and Quebec, Saskatchewan gives its 1 million residents a lot of open space.  Sparser populations usually translate into higher costs per customer for upgrades, but SaskTel persists.

SaskTel has historically relied on traditional DSL and has competition in larger communities from Shaw Cable, western Canada’s largest cable operator.  Although SaskTel’s DSL delivers lower speeds than Shaw can provide, it does so with no usage limits.

Shaw’s decision to provide considerably more generous usage allowances has kept the pressure on SaskTel to upgrade its infrastructure to compete.

SaskTel CEO Ron Styles told the Leader-Post its fiber optic network will give cable a run for its money, and until then, it is satisfied undercutting cable pricing for broadband, delivering a far better experience than either Rogers or Bell provides eastern Canadians, Styles says.

Seaboard president Iain Grant found that what customers are willing to pay for service can also influence what prices providers charge.

“The price is more based on what you’re prepared to pay,” Grant said.

People in western Canada evidently are not willing to hand over as much money as their friends in Ontario and Quebec.

West of Saskatchewan lies Alberta and British Columbia — Telus territory.  Telus is western Canada’s largest phone company and also principally competes with Shaw Cable.

Shaw has forced Telus to back down on fueling enhanced revenue with usage caps of its own, and has been aggressively upgrading its network with additional fiber optics and DOCSIS 3 technology, forcing Telus to embark on its own upgrade effort.

Macleans reports western Canada’s more-competitive broadband market has been good for consumers, but has also exposed a difference in priorities for providers.

With Shaw breathing down its neck, Telus has committed to a $3 billion fiber optic network expansion in B.C., improved wireless coverage, and more IPTV service.  Macleans notes Telus is the only major telecom or cable company in Canada that hasn’t purchased a television asset, focusing instead on its core businesses of connecting customers.

In eastern Canada, Bell faces Rogers and Videotron.  Critics contend Bell sees no imminent threats there, and the phone giant is spending its money elsewhere, announcing a $3.4 billion acquisition of Astral Media — an entertainment company owning 24 specialty cable channels and pay-TV networks, including the Movie Network and HBO Canada.

Bell’s latest “investment” follows its 2010 $1.3 billion buyout of CTV and last year’s $1.32 billion co-purchase of Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment (the other buyer was their ‘arch-competitor’ Rogers Communications).

While Telus spends money on upgrading its broadband and video services to customers, Bell is positioning itself to control 34% of Canada’s TV universe.  Bell is also the same company that advocated slapping nationwide usage-based pricing on Canadian broadband consumers to pay for the “network upgrades” it contends were needed to handle increasing demand.

All Canadians fall somewhere on the Bell/Rogers Anger Continuum.

http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Conglomermate.flv

Introducing Conglomermate — “Only Conglomermate makes sure you’re matched up with someone in the same phase you are.” — The Rick Mercer Report  (1 minute)

Rogers’ paid social media outreach campaign on Twitter was supposed to promote the company’s new 1Number service, more or less a ripoff of Google Voice (with fewer features) that lets Rogers’ cell phone customers make and receive calls from a computer or wireless phone, engage in video chats, and send text messages from the 1Number portal. But the paid tweets, which reached the top of Canada’s “trending topics,” quickly went rogue after antagonized customers who loathe Canada’s largest cable operator hijacked the campaign.

“Rogers deserves every tweet coming their way,” wrote one Ontario customer. “What a national disgrace of a company. I’ll bet my last dollar this is the first time top [management] has had any clear indication what their customers think of them. Until now, they’ve just been busy finding new ways to part customers from their money.”

“Bryck123″ took Rogers’ debacle more in stride: “Watching this epic fail is almost worth all that I’ve overpaid you guys over the years.”

Ironically, Rogers is paying Twitter for most of the venting and customer wrath.  Twitter sells a “promoted tweets” service to companies who pay whenever someone retweets, replies, clicks, or gives a “thumbs-up” to the promotion. A lot of Canadians are obliging, telling Rogers their customer service, billing and pricing is a disaster.

Hijacking a paid social media outreach campaign isn’t new on Twitter. McDonalds learned this themselves in January when its own paid hashtag turned into a bashtag.

“Rogers learned nothing from McDonalds’ disastrous Twitter campaign, which it smartly ended after a few hours,” said Twitter user Jacques Roglet. “Rogers has been carrying on for days, and so have their customers.”

Roglet says Rogers’ mistake was trying to use Twitter as a way to reach younger customers with a one-way advertising campaign.  Twitter was designed for two way (or more) communication, and Rogers showed no interest in establishing a dialogue with their customers.

They are now.

In an effort to turn consumer lemons into lemonade, a small army of Rogers’ social media representatives are reaching out to complaining customers to address sometimes long-standing problems and concerns.  Customers threatening to leave Rogers behind are winning special customer retention deals that slash rates or deliver larger broadband usage allowances for the same money.  But it may be too late for some.

“I think if there is some true Canadian identity, something shared by Canadians from all walks of life, it might be the common experience of having your money and time stolen by Roger’s criminal syndicate,” shared Michael To.

But things may not be that great elsewhere.

“I went through Bell, Rogers and Telus over the course of 12 years,” shared one reader of the Globe and Mail. “‘Bad service’ doesn’t describe it adequately – ‘absolute contempt for my humanity’ better describes it – every one of the them viewed me as a muppet to be abused, exploited and soaked as much as possible.”

[Thanks to Stop the Cap! reader Damian who alerted us.]

Rogers produced this video introducing customers to its 1Number service.  (2 minutes)