Pluses and minuses of living in Canada
Minus: Putting up with second rate mobile phone companies.
This week us Canadians are sitting here watching America go crazy for the iPhone (launching at 6pm this Friday). You'd think now would be the perfect time for Rogers to announce a release schedule for Canada. But no, silence. To rub salt in the wounds we all got a nice look at the AT&T/iPhone rate plans announced yesterday. They are about half the price of a regular Blackberry plan in this country and they include unlimited data transfer!!
Comparison...
AT&T iPhone plan: $59.99 (USD)
- 450 daytime minutes
- 5000 nights and weekends
- Unlimited mobile to mobile
- Unlimited data
- 200 text messages
Rogers Blackberry plan: $112.95 ($90 + $6.95 system access + $6 text plan)
- 350 daytime minutes
- Unlimited nights and weekends
- 25 MB data
- 125 text messages
Today's USD exchange rate: 0.94
Tom had a great post a couple of months ago detailing our fate as Canadian mobile data consumers. It's not pretty.
About Pema Hegan
A Kiwi living in Canada.
I love music, obsess over architecture, ride my bike most days and miss the ocean.
I'm a partner and managing director at Rethink Toronto.
Before that I founded and then sold GigPark, a social web startup. And before that I was the founding editor-in-chief of the Canadian media company, Dose.
Find me here
pema.hegan (at) gmail (dot) com
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June 27th, 2007 - 11:39
This is freaking bonkers. Time to deregulate the mobile business, no? Verizon or AT&T get in here, and it’s happy times.
June 27th, 2007 - 11:47
We can only hope.
The Bell talks certainly don’t look like they will result in any promising changes for us humble consumers.
July 6th, 2007 - 17:19
Gayness for sure! My cousin in Philly got one last week and I’m dying to see it and try it out. Ridiculous that there is no launch date in Canada yet for them.
March 14th, 2008 - 22:53
I just got a SMS from Rogers which says that they going to apply long-distance rates on top of my current air time rate to all long-distance incoming calls.
This is just ridicules.
In Canada we have worse mobile service in the world and this is not a joke. Most developing countries have lower price rate for much better quality mobile service. I will vote for anyone on next election who can promise that we will have the mobile service provider that can deliver high quality service with a reasonable price rate. There is no one country in Europe has so high price rate and so poor quality service!!!
March 15th, 2008 - 16:54
I hear you angryman!
http://www.wirelessnorth.ca has a lot of good info about wireless in Canada, including the spectrum auction going on right now. Maybe another entrant in the wireless market here will help get the prices down and the service quality up?!