Wirelessnorth.ca

Thanks to everyone who wrote in. It’s worth mentioning that a few (by few we mean 20,000 and counting) densizens have gathered to express their opinions on Rogers’ new iPhone pricing. They don’t like it. And this story has legs, having been picked up by fortune/CNN 15,000 Canadians petition for iPhone rate relief and the globe’s report on business. RuinedIphone is taking the noble if possibly quixotic approach of hoping for lower tariff by asking Steve and Ted nicely. The petition site is also somewhere between a blend of savvy populist rabble rousing and a clever way to reap donation money. We wish we’d thought of it.

Note that wirelessnorth.ca always welcomes your unsolicited EMT and paypal donations to editor@wirelessnorth.ca.

related post and discussion thread: Rogers iPhone pricing released (for real this time)

Don’t get me wrong. Here at WirelessNorth.ca, we really like the lines of the upcoming bold. But what’s the deal with the kickstart flip phone from Canada’s own Research in Motion? The thing kinda looks like a fat blackberry pearl with another pearl stuck to the top of it. At what price would you buy one of these?

^{Image courtesy berryshack via intomobile}

Rogers as officially released pricing for the iPhone on their network. Those that got excited for the last pricing leak may be disappointed to learn that it was found out to be false/hoax or rather a copy paste of ATT&T pricing. Here is the real scoop:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                              Sent      Incoming
                                              Text      Text       Visual
    Price   Voice                    Data     Messages  messages   Voicemail
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------
    $60 /   150 minutes + unlimited  400 MB   75        Unlimited  Unlimited
    month   Evening and Weekend
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------
    $75 /   300 minutes + unlimited  750 MB   100       Unlimited  Unlimited
    month   Evening and Weekend
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------
    $100 /  600 minutes + unlimited  1 GB     200       Unlimited  Unlimited
    month   Evening and Weekend
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------
    $115 /  800 minutes + unlimited  2 GB     300       Unlimited  Unlimited
    month   Evening and Weekend
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------

So the basic plan will cost plus $15/month for caller ID, plus 6.95 system access fee, probably a $35 activation fee for new subscribers. And $199 for the phone. Overage charges on iPhone data are unclear. The is no unlimited data option.

The phone does come with free wifi at Rogers/fido hotpots at least which is nice at least.

Call it $81.95 a month at minimum with caller ID. Or $3,182 plus GST/PST over the live over the 3 year contract.

For comparison, AT&T will be offering unlimited data on the iPhone for $30/month with a voice plan and a two year contract.

O2 in the UK will be offering the phone with unlimited data and 75min/8 month contracts for $60 a month or a free iphone with a $90 1500min/18month contract.

UPDATE: Overage charges are $30 ($0.50/MB) for the first 60MB in overage and $0.03/MB after that. Official iphone pricing page on Rogers.com.

Though the denouement could go on all week, we’re clearly into the short strokes of this spectral auction. The long dead ghosts of competition in this country finally revivified, as early as the end of this week, if you can imagine the specter of it.

The big winners will be: Quebecor, Globalive, Shaw, Data AV and Bragg out east and MTS or Sasktel if you live in the middle.

ISupply has released the results of their tear down analysis of the new 3G iphone. Apparently the component and assembly costs of the device is $179. Forgetting for a second the hundreds of millions Apple likely has and will spend on the design, development and marketing of the device… that’s pretty cheap. So want to know what the things are made of? (they’re not just full of stars apparently)

So there you have the ingredients. Though I don’t think that just the list and a trusty ikea alen key is going to help you put one together.

Anyhow, here is the real kicker:

“At a hardware BOM and manufacturing cost of $173, the new iPhone is significantly less expensive to produce than the first-generation product, despite major improvements in the product’s functionality and unique usability, due to the addition of 3G communications,” said Dr. Jagdish Rebello, director and principal analyst for iSuppli. “The original 8Gbyte iPhone carried a cost of $226 after component price reductions, giving the new product a 23 percent hardware cost reduction due to component price declines.”

Imagine, for a second, a world where great warehouses in shenzhen churn out pre-designed Android devices (which would basically the same components) or devices with the newly-free S60 OS or cheap-ish windows mobile. Then imagine the churning out of such devices a year from now 23% cheaper and with a few more features, then 23% cheaper than that another year later… all hitting the shelves of Walmart, Canadacomputers or 7eleven at nominal markup.

This (thank you Moore’s law) is another reason why the next several years are going to be a very interesting time to be in mobile.

No it’s not over yet. These guys are tireless. For your continued entertainment and erudition however WirelessNorth.ca offers you yet another view / sneak peak of Canada’s would-be wireless landscape. Everything depends on your province. The following tables give a representation of how much of the whole 90MHz of AWS spectrum is currently spoken for by each bidder as weighted by population.

Understanding the numbers: expressed as a percentage of the total spectrum owned across what percentage of the provincial population. Someone owning all of the spectrum in all of the licenses in alberta, for example, would have 100%. All of the spectrum covering only half the population 50% etc. For another common example a spectrum holder of 20MHz across the whole province would be expressed as 22% (20/90) or 10MHz equates to 11% if the license covers the whole province. Consider 11% as the minimum for license to offer service covering everyone in a province.

This all makes a little more sense once visualized as little colorful pie charts across a map of Canada. This is just a sneak peak. When (if) the auction finally does close, WirelessNorth.ca will be offering a downloadable version of all our Auction data, colorful visualizations and analysis. Possibly there will a free and reasonably priced paid version of that. Significantly less than 4.05 Billion.

Toronto WirelessNorth.ca readers may want to check out (tonight):

An open forum for Toronto’s tech/web/media communities hosted by:

Matt Thompson, SavetheInternet.com and SaveOurNet.ca
Steve Anderson, SaveOurNet.ca and The Campaign for Democratic Media
Mark Kuznicki, Remarkk.com, Open Community Evangelist, TorCamp

Date/Time: Tuesday, June 24th, 6:00pm
Location: Fionn MacCool’s, 181 University Avenue @ Adelaide, Toronto
Snacks will be provided, cash bar
Your donation/sponsorship to help cover costs can be made by purchasing special tickets above.

Canada’s digital future is at a crossroads, and our community has an historic opportunity to help protect and shape that future for the next generation.

Bell Canada’s bandwidth throttling of third party ISPs has thrust the political battle over Net Neutrality and related issues, which have raged for some time in the United States, onto the front-page in Canada. The stakes are high. Canada’s digital future must be shaped by citizens, entrepreneurs, Internet innovators and the free market….

This forum will be introduced by Matt Thompson, campaign strategist for SavetheInternet.com and co-founder of the new Canadian coalition SaveOurNet.ca. Matt will sketch out the two opposing visions and plans for the future of Canada’s Internet and innovation economy… He’ll also brief us on recent victories for the U.S. Net Neutrality campaign, and what they may mean for Canada.

Also on hand will be SaveOurNet.ca co-founder Steve Anderson, to report on the trajectory of Saving Our Net in Canada, his recent meetings with industry and public interest groups and highlight the newest additions to the SaveOurNet.ca Coalition.

Mark Kuznicki will serve as moderator and facilitate a town hall-style conversation on a number of key questions.

Digital access, ICT competitiveness and net neutrality encompass some big issues that potentially everyone in Canada. Metrics show that Canada is slipping behind other OECD countries in ICT competitiveness. Meanwhile, all mainstream media formats are shifting rapidly to digital formats. Important decisions made now will affect to what extent you favorite wired or wireless network operators will also be able to legally manage, throttle or otherwise limit competition for all the content and applications that flow on “their” networks.

The potential problems are clear, however, the solutions and prudence of specific proposed solutions (like manadated net neutrality) are amply debatable.

WirelessNorth.ca encourages folks from any side of the issues to come out and learn, discuss and debate Canada’s networked future. See you there.

UPDATE: facebook event page
Facebook group for future events in your area.

Canada’s AWS spectrum auction passed 4 Billion dollars today. The end is finally near however as we can predict that this auction will finish up some time this week. The most dramatic action of the day was from Bragg. Bragg withdrew from a swath of 10MHz licenses across Atlantic Canada in round 109 in order to hang on to presence in northern Ontario and Alberta. Here’s how things look at round 113:

Bids:  
$4,009,235,920

New blackberry pricing from Rogers is now official. The key difference is a new flex plan of $50 for $500 that scales to $100 for 6GB as well as a little better deal than before on a $30 for 300MB. Rogers is making room for the 3G blackberries due out later this summer. Here’s the details from the Rogers site:

Compared with the iPhone plan, $30 for for 300MB doesn’t sound quite as nice as $30 for “unlimited” access. On the other hand 3 year contracts are not a requirement for the new bberry plans.

The flex plans and the higher caps on these Rogers will go a ways to helping consumers keep their bill, if not much lower, at least predictable. Unpredictable and often punitive pricing on data has been one of the major barriers to adoption of data and mobile applications in Canada.

However, you need to add these data plans to a blackberry voice plan, plus system access fee, plus “extras” like voicemail and caller ID. Don’t think that these rates will save you from your roaming bill:

“Standard roaming rate is billed at 5¢ per KB [$52,000 /GB] in both the United States and other countries. Customers with a BlackBerry Plan will be billed at only 1¢ per KB [$10,400/GB] while roaming in the USA, Puerto Rico or the U.S. Virgin Islands.”

As far as we know, pricing is still pretty ugly on roaming minutes and SMS txts rates. (Did you know that roaming txts are $0.95 a pop when roaming in the US? and that rogers will actually charge you long distance charges on incoming calls?).

Thanks to Colin for being the fist to tip us off to the details (back on Friday already).

We’re now watching to see how Bell and Telus respond. (and Quebecor, Globalive, Data AV, Shaw…)

The action has shifted today to a flurry of multiple bids for secondary regions in Quebec, the east and even the territories. From the squiggly chart above you can see clearly the bidding ceiling of each of the bidders – with only Rogers and perhaps Telus showing showing they might still have headroom un-revealed.

If you are wondering on the drop in Globalive, that was them withdrawing a 97M bid on Monteal 313D block in round 73. Globalive has since been plowing that money into Quebec City and other Quebec licenses. Quebec is strategic because it could affect Globalives roaming terms in the future. Under the auction rules, new entrants meeting minimum national 5-year rollout benchmarks can qualify for an additional 5 years of mandated roaming access to incumbent’s networks.

At present, here’s how Montreal Spectrum is looking (a Quebecor shut-out of the set-aside spectrum):
A Block 20 MHz – Rogers
B Block 20 MHz – Quebecor
C Block 10 MHz – Quebecor
D Block 10 MHz – Quebecor
E Block 10 MHz – Bell
F Block 20 MHz – Telus