Hmmm... Can't Reach This Page
A friend called me two weeks ago because his IPTV app had stopped playing anything, just a spinning wheel and a generic playback error. When he pulled up the service's own domain in a browser to see...
Category
telecom
Money First, Accountability Later: Ottawa's New Internet Backbone Needs an Open Access Mandate
Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in front of hundreds of the world's largest investors on Tuesday and announced that Ottawa would reinvest "tens of billions of dollars" of capital into a new sovereign...
I Spent a Decade Running the M6. Then I Met It Again.
Google Drive sent me one of those notifications a couple of weeks ago. Storage full. Time to clean up. So I started poking through the corners of my drive looking for things to delete, and that is how...
The AI Divide: A New Fault Line Opening Before We Finished Closing the Old One
Earlier this week I had the privilege of moderating a panel at Digital Access Day, the Canadian Internet Society's annual gathering of thoughtleaders working on the issues shaping our networks and our...
Spain Just Proved Why ISPs Can't Be the Internet's Content Police
Earlier this year, I wrote about "Bill S-209" (https://mgamble.ca/p/bill-s-209-protecting-kids-at-the-cost-of-the-internet) and its deeply flawed premise: that we can protect kids from pornography by...
Bill S-209: Protecting Kids at the Cost of the Internet
Bill S-209 aims to protect kids from explicit material—but it risks turning ISPs into internet police, undermining privacy, and threatening freedom online. There’s a better way. 🛑📵 #BillS209 #Privacy #InternetFreedom
Supporting legacy 4 digit dialling in Microsoft Teams
Migrating an organization's communication system to Microsoft Teams represents a pivotal shift, particularly for large enterprises rooted in established dialing practices. Unlike traditional telephony systems, which rely on extensions, Teams emphasizes user identity for calls, enabling users to rea
You can't get there from here - port blocking by residential ISPs
Recently I was working with one of my customers to setup the Azure Files [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/storage/files] service - a cloud based file sharing solution from Microsoft that allows you to "mount Azure Files shares from anywhere—from on premises to the cloud—giving you a truly
Flanker brands are killing independent ISPs
Recently a relative of mine moved and needed internet access. Having not shopped for residential internet service in a long time, I was shocked to see that Virgin, the Bell "flaker brand" was selling 50/10 VDSL service for $40/month with no install fees and a Wifi-enabled DSL modem included. Yes,
Caller ID Spoofing with Microsoft Teams and Calling Plan
Microsoft Calling Plans for Teams [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/calling-plans-for-office-365] are a great way for Teams users to enable the telephony features of Microsoft Teams without having to deploy any of the infrastructure required for Teams Direct Routing [https://learn.m
The CRTC once again fails Canadians
As you may have seen in the news recently, Canadian merchants are starting to charge processing fees for credit card transcations [https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/canadian-businesses-can-charge-credit-card-fees-starting-oct-6-1.6096370] . The history of this goes back to 2018, when class action law
Brief Summary of the Rogers Outage RFI
Late last night the CRTC posted the reply from Rogers to the request for information [__GHOST_URL__/static/Rogers-CRTC-RFI.pdf] (RFI) it sent last week. In the RFI, the CRTC asked Rogers to respond to 55 questions about the multi-day Canada-wide service outage that started early in the morning of J
Rogers outage postmortem - is it time for structural separation?
On Friday July 8th around 4:45AM, the Rogers network in Canada went down hard [https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-view-of-the-rogers-communications-outage-in-canada/] . Cellular, internet, and cable services were disrupted for customers across the country. The NetBlocks monitoring group esti
The cautionary tale of the $5000 pop-up window
It started with a pop-up window on an old Windows PC indicating there was a problem with the computer. The user needed to contact Microsoft support via an 800 number for assitance to resolve the error. Innocent enough, right? That single popup message kicked off a harrowing multi-hour odyssey duri
Canadians deserve service based competition
In my talk a few weeks ago [https://mgamble.ca/a-kafkaesque-nightmare-the-history-of-stir-shaken-in-canada/] at RAG New Orleans I ended by saying "Or maybe the situation is worse. Maybe the regulator fails to see that smaller players – who function without large scale facilities - are legitimate st
The CST-GA is "SHAKEN" down small carriers
If you've been following by blog, you'll know that equal access for all telecommunications providers to participate in the SHAKEN/STIR call authentication framework has been one of the causes I have been most passionate about. In late August, smaller Canadian telecommunications service providers (T
The Canadian PSTN needs Next Generation Routing
Last week wasn't great for the Canadian Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Two of Canada's largest competitive carriers suffered outages - Iristel was victim of a DDoS attack that lasted over 24 hours, between November 15th and 16th. At the same time, Thinktel experienced issues related to