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Canada's Rogers taking (rightful?) shellacking from Internet over iPhone pricing plans
8 comments- TAGS:Canada, iPhone, plans, rogers
- IT TOPICS:Macintosh & Apple, Mobile & Wireless, Personal Technology
Just about everyone in the universe hates their mobile provider. Lock-ins, hidden charges, nickel and dime-ing and abysmal customer service plague most large carriers the world over. Rarely, however (Australia's Telstra excluded) do we see the level of reactions that Rogers' 3 Year/limited download iPhone plans have garnered.
Rogers announced their plans yesterday (Friday) morning at around 9am EST - perhaps trying to slip one by the media. Canadians have known since April that Rogers would be carrying the 3G iPhone and were rightfully paranoid about what kind of plans Rogers would offer.
However, within minutes the Internet was alight with angry Canadians and a sympathetic global iPhone audience who could planely see the inequity. Within 24 hours, two different pages devoted to the story had reached the Digg homepage including one with a fairly 'descriptive' URL.
Perhaps Rogers has to charge more because of the sparsely populated nature of their populace? Providing wireless service to a population that is 1/2 the size of the UK's but in more than four times the area creates different cost models. Canadians will tell you, however, that most of their country's expanse is not covered by Rogers or any other phone carrier so the point is moot.
Canadians do have a right to complain. I found a pretty accurate normalized comparison between carriers in the UK, US and Canada:
The big loss for Canadians is the voice/data cap and the 3 year plan. Oh, and the $15 caller ID add on! If you are a Canadian iPhone customer, you not only have to commit to Rogers for twice as long as a British user or 50 percent longer than an American, you have to keep an eye on your minutes and megabytes used.
The basic plan allows for 400Mb and 150 voice minutes per month. That averages out to about 13mb/day and 8 minutes of talk time per week day. That is some serious miserly usage and something that a 3G device is likely to burn out.
'Luckily' for Canadians, 3G rollout is relatively sparse so it will be slightly harder to hit that 13mb/day than in Europe or the US where 3G rollout has accelerated.
Unfortunately, there is no competition in Canada in the GSM/Edge/HSDPA space, so unless the online petitions move Rogers or lawmakers step in, things aren't likely to get any better.
The plans:
| Price | Voice | Data | Sent Text Messages | Incoming Text Messages | Visual Voicemail |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $60 | 150 minutes + unlimited evening and weekend | 400 MB (up to 200,000 text emails or 3,100 web pages or 1,360 photo attachments) | 75 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| $75 | 300 minutes + unlimited evening and weekend | 750 MB (up to 380,000 text emails or 5,900 web pages or 2,560 photo Attachments) | 100 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| $100 | 600 minutes + unlimited evening and weekend | 1 GB (up to 524,000 text emails or 8,000 web pages or 3,500 photo attachments) | 200 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| $115 | 800 minutes + unlimited evening and weekend | 2 GB (up to 1,048,000 text emails or 16,000 web pages or 7,000 photo attachments) | 300 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Ouchy!
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