Early lessons in Canada’s telecom industry

[ Continued from Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 ] In early 2001, my grandfather wanted to show my generation his birthplace while he was still healthy enough to do so, and so much of my extended family travelled together to Istanbul. When I got off the plane, I heard Morse code all around me. Having learned Morse code off the sticker listing it on the front of a Fisher Price walkie talkie as a kid, I recognised the letters everywhere as ‘SMS’ and soon learned that everyone else in the world was already using these “simple messaging system” texts that had not yet really arrived in Canada.

Already being involved in the world-wide open source software community both professionally and through my management roles at openprojects.net and then OFTC, I realised that a phone that could do text messages would be awfully useful.

Shortly after my return from Turkey, my grandfather gave me a Qualcomm dual-mode analogue-digital cell phone locked to Telus that he had bought, along with a gift card for two months of pre-paid usage, that he had realised he was not up for learning. He had retired as an engineer when slide rules were replaced with calculators, after all, and the few emails he sent were in all caps and phrased a lot like telegrams.

Telus phones, at the time, could not text anyone who was not a Telus customer, let alone international users, and when I asked their technical support how to text people outside the network or outside the country, they told me to use my phone’s web browser — itself very primitive — to go to the website of the service provider of the person I wanted to text, and use that to send the message. How to find out which service provider each of my contacts used was not explained — perhaps I could text them to ask?

Fido, on the other hand, unique among all cell phone carriers in Canada at the time, was integrated into the world wide text message network that was leaving Canada behind, and I very quickly switched to them, using a second-hand Nokia 5190. Soon after, I bought a cellular Internet GPRS (today we would call it 2G, and it worked at about the speed of a dialup connection) card that came with unasterisked unlimited Canada and US-wide data that Fido offered, way ahead of its time, for only $50/month.

In the spring of 2004, I used this technology, along with a Magellan GPS 315, a small GPS designed for boats that did not have maps but could be plugged into a computer, to create a simple web page that showed my location and heading on MapQuest, scaled to my speed, in near real-time. It did this by reading latitude, longitude, speed, and heading from the GPS, from the laptop on the front seat connected to the internet via the GPRS card, connecting to the web server in my bedroom, and depositing the information in a plain text file once per minute, which a script then parsed and inserted into the MapQuest link on demand. It was way ahead of its time and I can only imagine how differently my life could have been had I pursued inexpensive live GPS tracking as a business in 2004, instead of merely as a nerdy hobby.

In November of that same year, Rogers bought Microcell, the parent company of Fido which, until that time, had been an independent cell phone operator.

The previous year, I had already had a profoundly negative run-in with Rogers when I wanted to set up a web server on my home Internet connection to run my newly created trainspotting website, www.railfan.ca. Rogers did not permit servers, cutting off my service when they discovered I was hosting my website on my home connection, a violation of the fundamental principle of net neutrality that underpins the Internet, so I was already leery of big tech companies and Rogers in particular when they bought Fido. With that history, I was fairly nervous about what would happen. As I wrote on July 24, 2006:

Two years ago, Rogers bought Fido. I was concerned that the company would be gutted, but was happy to hear that Fido would be a more or less independent company within Rogers, with its own phones and its own plans, and its existing customers would not, ostensibly, be affected.

Not long after that, my GPRS became less reliable. A year later, it became evident that Rogers was removing Fido's infrastructure and places where I used to have Fido service but my friends did not have Rogers service quickly disappeared.

My GPRS connection began to hang up on me. If I used the connection actively, it would hang up on me after 12 minutes, like clockwork. Because the IPs are dynamic, any time I reconnected, all my TCP connections were broken. For the non-technical reader, that means it became a pain in the rump to use. A call to Fido's once-useful tech support yielded no useful information.

I spent the past week in Ottawa attending a conference. On the way there, my friends and I used the GPRS card to get on the Internet from highways 401 and 417. As always, the connection cut out every 12 minutes, like clockwork. As we approached Ottawa on the 417, the connection stayed up. It worked all the way to our hotel with no further interruptions.

A couple of evenings later, still at the conference, still in Ottawa, a dinner reception room had no wireless reception. I put my GPRS card in my laptop and got on line. It survived, uninterrupted, through the reception.

Yesterday, we left Ottawa, and again connected through GPRS. It required no reconnection and worked reliably until we got outside of the Ottawa area. The rest of the way home, it cut off every 12 minutes.

I can only assume that Rogers does not wish to irritate government officials from Canadian and foreign governments by hanging up on them, but us lowly regular customers are clearly not important enough to them for such consideration.

My mistrust of big telecom, seeded by the profoundly poor customer service of Telus, the submarined destruction of Fido’s avant-garde services by Rogers, and a similar run-in with Bell Canada that forced me to make my home phone line irrevocably commercial in order to get unlimited data through a third-party DSL provider, would have profound implications when it came time to address rural Internet needs in office years later.