Roland Tanglao's Weblog

LATER: The $50 a month unlimited data plan is no longer available to new Fido subscribers. I am "grandfathered". So unlucky new users will get r*pped off! This is really bad and doesn't encourage mobile data at all!

My data traffic from my last Fido bill was 89 Megabytes (of cameraphone pictures uploaded to flickr using the fantatic flickr uploader Shozu) which means that if I didn't have the $50 a month flat rate plan, I would be paying $30/MB * 89 = $2670 (this can't be right, it can't be this much of a r*poff, somebody leave me a comment and say it ain't so!) ! Until we have real competition in Canada (which is not in the cards thanks to the moribund CRTC; the next mobile phone I buy with my own money, like Boris, will use WiFi to route around this damage!), I can't see wireless data services taking off here. I laugh every time I see one of the Canadian TV phone ads and picture the sad day when one of these TV phone customers gets their bill. Hah! Even cameraphones are a r*poff here in Canada!

From Wireless data in Canada is ridiculously expensive | B.Mann Consulting.:

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Mentioning his on the road week at Les Blogs, Paolo Valdemarin reports that 3G access with his phone costs 0,75 eurocent/kb = 7,6 Euros per Mb.

I would happily pay that price, especially for the approximately 300kbps speed of 3G. How much does wireless cost in Canada? Well, only Fido/Rogers have GPRS, while Bell and Telus have the ridiculous 1X no SIM card lock in nonsense. If you don't have a data plan, GPRS costs $30 CDN / MB, or 30 cents/kb. So, uploading one picture from my 1.3MP cameraphone costs about $9. Ridiculous!

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