Not surprisingly, a KPMG worldwide survey has shown that Canadians are behind the curve when it comes to more sophisticated use of mobile phones.

My viewpoint: the lack of standards, carrier locking, and the high cost are the main hindrances, stifling competition and dragging the market.

The study is published here.

Via the CBC.

The mobile market in North America is badly fragmented, due to
different carriers using different technologies (CDMA vs. GSM), different frequencies for different companies (AWS, 2100), and locking of phones to the carrier.

This fragmentation strengthens the stranglehold of the carrier on the customer, who has a higher barrier switching from one company to the other.

Industry lobbyists still call for more balkanization of the market, by adding more frequencies, against standardization.

This is misinformation, fearmongering and industry lobbying at its worst.

The Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) is alleging that carriers need more radio waves, because consumers are using more bandwidth and have more connected devices than ever before.

Android tablets are here! This is good, since they will provide competition for the Apple iPad.

Examples are Pandigital Novel and the Dell Streak.

Anyone with more than a couple of computers on a LAN will sooner face the issue of increased bandwidth usage by someone on the LAN. Be this teenagers downloading via torrents, employees watching YouTube and Facebook videos, or other reasons.

Finding a suitable tool to allow bandwidth monitoring and capping proved to be not an easy task. I am still looking for a solution, but have a few pointers to share.

Unlike WINDMobile which operates in the AWS spectrum, Mobilicity operates on the standard frequencies used elsewhere in the world for GSM.

It is nice to see the CBC go deep into the iPad and highlight Apple's tight control of the platform. Moreover, they also criticize the disparity between USA data plans and Canadian ones, which much less bandwidth for more cost.

Joining the heels of WIND Mobile, a new company, Mobilicity, will start operations in Spring 2010.

I am having a busy 10 days coming, with several talks at different venues. Hope to see you at some of them. They are:

• Toronto: October 24, 2009 at Ontario Linux Fest: Introduction ot the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl).
• Toronto: October 30, 2009 at Seneca College's Free Software and Open Source Symposium: Open Source for Fun and Profit: Making a career out of FOSS.
• Kitchener: November 2, 2009 at the Kitchener/Waterloo Linux Users Group: Linux Tools for Monitoring and Peformance.

Steve Ballmer said that the economy will 'reset'. Although he has some valid points, the choice of words seems very Microsoft.

The "reset" terminology reminded me of an incident years back when my older kids were in much younger: Microsoft and the dumbing down of generations.