cell calculatorAfter Industry Canada spent over a million dollars trying and failing to launch a cell phone comparison tool for Canada, someone has gone and done it for free. That someone is J Ben Benjamin in partnership with web shop einfiniteweb.com. While not so much yet the world’s prettiest website, it’s gets the job done. You can compare voice minutes by time of day and incoming vs outgoing, data and text and a slew of other options (tip: look for data under “advanced search” took us a while to find that).

This is commendable work. Despite some progress the carriers have made recently towards simplifying plans, overall rate structures remain highly obfuscated in Canada. Therefore tools like this one that can bring any additional transparency are of great value.

A few caveats though, there are a few things the calculator does not take into consideration. On the cost side remember that all minutes are not created equal and nor are all “evenings”. On Rogers, for example, a minute can be one second long and an evening minute may start hours later than on a seemingly identical Fido plan.

The other factor not considered here is quality or value for service. A cheap plan isn’t much good if the network coverage doesn’t reach you or if all the handsets available are ancient crap (here’s looking at you flanker brands).

Some fun games you might be able to play with this tool: Check out the price discrimination by province! Find the best plans for the rather short list of specific phones actually worth buying: BBerry, Droids, Iphone, Pre etc. (once they all come out). Sounds like fodder for future articles.

LINK: www.cellphoneratecalculator.com