Roland Tanglao's Weblog

There are far more important issues to deal with than the Rogers iPhone rates (e.g. the ridiculousness of Bill C-61, global warming, etc) but I was forced to comment after I received the exact same email from MS&L Digital (Rogers' American PR firm) that Tris Hussey received: (my current plan is to invoke the "Ian Bell option", i.e. import a unlocked 3G iPhone from France and buy a r*poff 1GB/month data plan from Rogers which gets around the 3 year contract!)

QUOTE (from Tris' blog which he received permission to post, the email I received is identical, anybody else get the exact same email?)

Hello,

My name is Nicole Burguess and I’m writing on behalf of Rogers to give you some additional information about the Rogers rate plans available for the iPhone.

The iPhone 3G bundles released June 27 are not the only price plans available to customers, they are the high value plans that allow Rogers customers to use the device to its fullest and offer considerable savings over separate voice and data plans that exist in market today.

That said, Rogers customers have more choices available to them and can use their existing voice and smartphone data plans if they wish. For example, they can select from the new data pricing (ranging from $30 for 300MB to $100 for 6GB or $50 Flex Rate plan) and add a voice plan, or they can choose a combined voice and data plan to best suit their individual needs.

Customers are not required to take the value packs, and can order most other features a la carte, such as $7 for Caller ID.

Existing customers can keep their existing voice service plan and pick a separate data plan (not in the iPhone 3G bundle) to meet their needs. They will need to check their upgrade eligibility, but any customer with a monthly service fee that is over $30 can upgrade to an iPhone 3G at $199 (for the 8GB model). Other options outside the iPhone bundle may be available depending on the customer’s individual information.

If you have any questions, please let me know and I will do my best to help you.

Sincerely,

Nicole Burguess

Account Executive | MS&L Digital

END QUOTE

Here's my response:

Hi Nicole:

Thank-you for your email but it does not respond to the concerns that many people including myself have namely:

1. Why are the contracts 3 years for the iPhone rather than 2 years or 1 year like they are elsewhere in the world?

2. Why is data so much more expensive for the iPhone than AT&T plans? Why is there no unlimited option? I can guess at reasons but this is something that Rogers in my opinion needs to make clear. I have been using a Fido "grandfathered data plan" for unlimited EDGE data for $50 a month. Until Rogers communicates clearly why an unlimited 3G data plan at a price of $100/month or less is nonviable, the lack of an affordable unlimited data plan is indefensible.

3. The lack of reasonably priced data plans is hindering Canada business which in the end hinders Rogers.

I'll be blogging the above and your response (unless you ask me otherwise) at rolandtanglao.com.

Cheers!

...Roland Tanglao +1 604 729 7924

p.s. Canadian idealists (of which I am not one) would be outraged that Rogers is reaching out to Canadian bloggers using an American PR firm (I realize you have a satellite office in Toronto but your headquarters are in the USA). I "googled" your firm and was encourage to find out that you have a social media practise and that you were behind the GM FastLane blog; hopefully you will influence Rogers to engage in social media and to clearly communicate in a timely fashion; something they have been incapable of in the past.

So the questions start:

1. Is there a bandwidth cap?
2. Are 3rd party applications like ShoZu and Qik (if ShoZu and Qik don't port to the iPhone others will) allowed?

IF

ShoZu-like and Qik-like applications appear on the iPhone 3G and they work well and Rogers allows them with a reasonable bandwidth cap (reasonable to my multi-media creation needs is 2GB YMMV :-) !!!),

THEN (it's not a r*poff, hurrah!) AND I'll get a 3G iPhone (since net-net, it's only about $10 a month more to pay than my current $50 per month grandfathered EDGE Fido plan).

The only thing that still gives me pause is the 3 year contract but I can live with it if the apps are there!

So I guess I don't buy one on my birthday but wait to see if the 3rd party apps that I want appear and if Rogers allows them.

QUOTE

$199 + 36months x $90 = $3440 and that’s if you buy the cheap one. Don’t forget the GST/PST.

However, you’ll probably realize you are likely to spend at least that much on cellphone service in the next three years, no matter what your plan.

END QUOTE

The ongoing Fido (and Rogers) r*poff continues. The math: 0.10/0.15 = 66.67%. In a world where every other form of electronic messaging is decreasing in price, Rogers and Fido continue to raise their messaging prices. Needless to say the knock on effect for businesses and innovation and Canada is a net negative. I h*te SMS but it's essential for today's real time business and this is a tax by a member of the Canadian bandwidth oligopoly on businesses and consumers.

QUOTE

U.S. TEXT MESSAGING RATE CHANGE

Please note that effective July 15, 2008, the rate for sending a text message from Canada to the United States is changing to $0.25 (from $0.15). This change also applies to Text messaging options and certain Value packs, as text messages sent to the United States will no longer be included in the options. Pricing does not include applicable taxes.

Visit fido.ca/text for text messaging rates and other important information.

...

International text message Options

25 international text messages $4

50 international text messages $7

END QUOTE

Rogers implements kludgey SMS "you are now getting r*pped off" alert system instead of reasonable data plans. Title says it all. Instead of wasting money on designing, implementing and telling customers about this system, why not have reasonable cost data plans e.g. $50/month for 1GB, $60 for 2GB (and if there are good business and technical reasons why you can't do this even though other countries can, please communicate them)? Oh well now you know why billing software is a billion dollar business.

QUOTE

There is a new feature from Fido and Rogers that is available now to all subscribers. The system will automatically send you a text message to alert you when you are using pay per use data. This is especially important for people using an iPhone.

This is even more important for those who are using the $7 unlimited surfing plan. The system will tell you if you are incurring pay per use data charges. If you don't get a text, you should be fine. If you do, watch out and stop using data.

You will receive a warning text at thresholds such as:
- $10, 20, 50, 75, 100

This is available right now for people who are not on any sort of data plan. It will begin working on May 18th for those on a data plan such as the $7 plan.

END QUOTE

Rogers charges extra per kilobyte for the bult-in email app? This is really bad. I hope Howard got that wrong. Otherwise a lot of email junkies (if they can figure out how to configure their S60 email client, it's not easy) will be unpleasantly surprised by VERY VERY large data bills!

Is the "deep packet inspection" guy a Rogers employee? I can think of other techniques to detect third party apps, like hacking the S60 3G and EDGE communications software stack to check if the app is built in and if so to send some sort of "validation packet" which the Rogers gateway detects and removes (thanks to JeffG's friend for that idea!), many ways to skin this cat, all futile, innovation sapping and time consuming in the end, better to spend the energy on innovation than bogus packet inspection and billing software IMHO!

Anyways, compared to the rest of the world, as I said in my previous post, these plans are a r*poff and the N95 Browser while awesome compared to the pathetic browser in the rest of Rogers' phones (cf. any Motorola phone browser) is really inferior to the iPhone browser.

Again, my recommendation: Just say no to "browser only" data plans and "3rd party application bandwidth" taxes! Buy a 3rd party unlocked phone and get the $65 PC Card plan and enjoy your freedom!

QUOTE

One of the data plans available for it is 20 bucks a month, unlimited on device browsing (using Nokia’s terrific s60 browser), 2500SMS, “100’s” of MMS (the Rogers guy’s words) and unlimited web email. If you sign up on a 3 year then you also get unlimited Vision. The $7 unlimited on device browsing plan is also available.

If you add your own apps or use the Nokia email client (for POP or iMAP) then data is billed per kb (so don’t use your Slingbox unless you have WiFi). I asked how they can differentiate between the different types of data. One guy said they use deep packet inspection (the same thing Rogers uses to throttle bittorrent).

There are the typical Rogers customizations; separate Vision app, Music store that doesn’t work with the built-in music player, that sort of thing. It also appears to come with Telenav (which you have to pay to use) - Nokia’s mapping program is also available.

While I’m not thrilled with the customizations, I’m lukewarm about the plans. The data plans are incredibly limiting but the n95 has a pretty good browser so that makes things a little easier to bear.

END QUOTE

The N82 was released today with great fanfare (rightly so since it's the first Nokia with a real flash!) and some fun video but nobody has told me whether it can pass the "Roland Challenge" and the "Roland ShoZu Challenge". I'm hoping the latest Nokias like the N95-3 and the N82 pass because of their increased RAM.

p.s. in case you forgot, here's the Roland Challenge: take 50 pictures in 30 minutes of random stuff and see if the phone or camera app crashes (without any 3rd party software installed and a freshly formatted 2Gig or larger card)

p.p.s. and here's the Roland ShoZu Challenge: Repeat the Roland Challenge but install ShoZu first and set ShoZu to auto-upload and again let me know if ShoZu, camera app or the phone crashes

YES! Drupal running on S60 mobile phones! Have to try this, guess I'll have to get a S60 device with as much RAM as an E90!

QUOTE

PAMP stands for Personal Apache, MySQL, PHP, so yes, the full LAMP stack will be made available for S60 smart phones. In addition, there will be PHP extension modules that provide access to the core functionality of the phone. And on top of PAMP you can basically install any LAMP based content management system. For instance, Drupal can be installed off the shelf. Yes, a fair amount of memory is needed and it's still pretty experimental stuff, but it runs quite nicely on E90. So, if you are in the neighbourhood, join us in Las Vegas Johan

END QUOTE

UPDATE: here's the FeedM8 badge

Another mobile RSS service to try: FeedM8 (requires verification code: [FM8327-55]).This one allows you to make money and is Canadian (Tris Hussey at blognation has the full FeedM8 scoop). We'll see! I'm skeptical (I believe in making money indirectly instead of directly off of "creating compelling constantly").

UPDATE: The SIM functionality (there appears to be no user replaceable SIM) appears to be controlled through the iTunes store. Very interesting. 

I am not a cellphone hardware engineer but it seems ridiculous to support EDGE and support CDMA which is what Boris is implying ("If the iPhone is, indeed, a CDMA phone, then the whole will the iPhone be locked to Cingular question is a bit moot: without SIM cards, you can't take it to another network.") but hey we could both be wrong. More likely, the iPhone is GSM and uses EDGE data and the SIM instead of being user replaceable is hardwired in the first version of the iPhone. The soap opera continues :-) !

FROM The Mossberg Solution - WSJ.com:

QUOTE

But the iPhone has a major drawback: the cellphone network it uses. It only works with AT&T (formerly Cingular), won't come in models that use Verizon or Sprint and can't use the digital cards (called SIM cards) that would allow it to run on T-Mobile's network. So, the phone can be a poor choice unless you are in areas where AT&T's coverage is good. It does work overseas, but only via an AT&T roaming plan.

In addition, even when you have great AT&T coverage, the iPhone can't run on AT&T's fastest cellular data network. Instead, it uses a pokey network called EDGE, which is far slower than the fastest networks from Verizon or Sprint that power many other smart phones. And the initial iPhone model cannot be upgraded to use the faster networks.

END QUOTE