Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Well.. I ordered an iPhone and set up my monthly plan on the fido.ca website.  Got the confirmation email, received the order confirmation #, and was told that my Mastercard had been charged, then guess what?  After a week and a half... NO PHONE!  I called them up yesterday to ask what was happening with my order to which the operator's reply was that there was no record of it!  So I'm now mired in a confusing battle with Fido just to find out what happened and exactly what good a confirmation email is if there is no record of it on their end.  Not pleased at all with the service and I'm wondering if I should just go ahead and go to a fido store and try to buy one in person... and hope that my mastercard ISN'T charged for the first one.

p-o'd in Toronto. 

Cost of quisition for a new client in the cell industry is 1300$, which means that until they have sucked 1300$ of profit out of you they are not making money, existing long term clients are may more profitalb than new ones so losing existing clients is bad really bad. Who the hell at Fido figured that anoying the crap out of exiting client was a good idea?

Wow, that's an amazing photo of that guy somersaulting -- and, yeah, "don't try this at home" ...unless you work for Cirque du Soleil, I guess! 

Re. the wireless situation: I just got my Fido bill for this month -- I have a cheap-o $7 "unlimited surfing" option (which is a joke, since it's entirely within Fido's extremely limited WAP), which is on top of my $20 (plus taxes etc.) 200 minutes Talk time.  In addition, my bill also accounts for a $9 for a "value pak" that includes caller ID and voice mail.  Yet my total was $60.  Why?  Because Fido tacked on nearly $13 in charges for "downloading" data -- via my G-Mail application, which I had downloaded earlier.  Of course they don't tell you this in advance -- they let you have one MB "free" (as part of that $7 option, which otherwise takes place ENTIRELY in their friggin' walled garden of WAP, which means you go absolutely NOWHERE), and after that one MB they start charging you for every kilobyte, but don't tell you that they're charging until you've hit $15.  

Isn't that swell?

So if I were to keep this up, I could pay $60 every month for ...well, not bloody much at all.  

It's very very frustrating.

And yes, it IS hurting Canadian productivity and our economy incredibly.

But meanwhile, there's very little understanding of how urgent the situation is in economic terms, particularly as it relates to cities and innovation.  Hard and soft infrastructure are both implicated.  For example, you can read this, which is something most of us implicitly understand:

Cities follow transportation. The ability to trade, in goods and ideas, is the primary driver of human development. Paris and London sit on rivers, Chicago on a lakeshore, Seattle alongside a storm-protected harbor. Fundamentally, cities develop to take in raw materials of every kind, then to add value by combining them into more specialized goods. Originally this meant iron ore, coal, and wood shaped into products and buildings. Now it also means software, genetic sequences, and circuitry.

These businesses and ideas don't occur in a vacuum. These ideas are brewed by discussions with the friend you run into at the coffee stand down the street. Every urban area's success is reliant upon its ability to foment face-to-face crossings between inventors and implementers, and these crossings happen proportionally to how dense and walkable our urban centers are.

 And yet in some dinosaur brains, those realities have failed to sink in, and it's business as usual, even to how we (they?) understand the significance of wireless.  That failure reaches right down to urban planning, as per McGill's Prof. of Architecture, Avi Friedman, whose article last Saturday in Victoria's Times-Colonist actually asked, in all sincerity, Has cyberspace killed the traditional town square?  Um, no, Prof. Friedman, if anything, "cyberspace" -- or, more accurately, mobile and locative technologies -- will succeed in bringing the public space back into play after it was nearly demolished by suburban, automobile-centric "city" planning.

Mobile technology makes the agora -- the public space -- real and usable in an immediate way again.  Meet-ups and business deals get planned and hatched and worked out, via mobile technology -- and public space (or semi-public, in cafes, etc.) plays a role here, too.

Heaven forbid that a Canadian academic (outside of Michael Geist and his colleagues) would grok that, though.  For most establishment thinkers, it's all about walled gardens, and about the old(er) economic model that dictates extracting as much pain from users as (in)decently possible. That's the old 19th century model of "resource extraction," which this country's oligarchs built their fortunes on.  It's all about monopolies and playing hardball. 

And unfortunately we have a ways to go before a new model of competition wrests control from their dry and crabby, clenched and greedy fingers.

Resource extraction (hit-and-run, boom-and-bust economies) was all well and good (not!) while it lasted, before cities (even in Canada!) effectively had to say, Get set - the future starts now.   But it's hardly a business model for the 21st century networked economy.

Sorry about the urbanism rant -- but this whole thing with wireless in Canada is driving me nuts...  It really shouldn't be this way.