But just think of mobile apps for a minute. LBA or location based apps have been hyped as some kind of a big deal. The problem is, and a lot of people seem to miss this point, if you are anywhere near home you probably already have a fairly good idea of things around you. At least the interesting things. And you know how to read the signs and how to find your way around.

It’s when you are out of your home range however that mobile location-based-apps can be enormously valuable. Google maps are a lifesaver when trying to find directions abroad. On top of maps there’s a wealth of apps that can help you find good restaurants, interesting sights, hotel deals etc. In an ancient city like Rome, the place is absolutely soaking in history and it absolutely cries out for augmented reality applications to let you visualize or at least understand more about the history and architecture of almost anyplace you might be standing.

As it stands now, this market, for Canadians doesn’t exist. At current roaming rates it’s quite literally cheaper to buy your phone a seat on AirCanada and fly it return back to Canada than it is to share or stream a mere 25MB of data to your friends (say 10 digital pictures or a couple minutes of streaming qik video). And buying a local SIM is little help when the vast majority of phones are sold locked (or CDMA for that matter).

For services this valuable it makes sense to charge a little for it. We pay $30 for a month of data in Canada, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to charge another $30/week for the convenience of data on the road. In reality though, actual roaming rates are a thousand times higher than this.

It’s time for this to change.

addendum: How do we fix it? Well at best Canadian carrier policies or anything Canadian regulators could do covers only half the problem. It may take cross-border co-operation or regulation (as in the EU), or perhaps competition from other technologies (global standards on open spectrum anyone?).

The first thing you need to understand: if you don’t make some changes to your existing plan and you just go about using your phone like you do every day, you’re going to come home to a very nasty surprise in the form of a Rogers bill that will have you immediately applying for a government bailout package. I hear those are actually becoming hard to get, so you might want to keep reading.

Jay points out, Rogers charges standard voice rates of $1.70 a minute, texts at $0.60 each (actually we’ve seen Rogers charge $0.95 texts in the US) and data rates at the astounding $0.03/KB (that means $30/MB, or approximately $150 to transfer one single average MP3 or youtube video). And then there is Roger’s delightful practice of charging you roaming AND long distance on incoming calls while in the U.S.

But there is some hope! Jay recommends a bunch of good ways NOT to use your phone in chargeable ways as well as a few darkly secret Rogers plans that can help bring down the charges.

But the real win (you have an unlocked phone right?) is to leave your Rogers SIM card behind when traveling. Citizen Ziggy recommends:

If you are going to U.S. for SXSW or any other reason and want to use data on iphone at good price.

Once you get over border, get a T-Mobile PREPAID SIM.
Call support number and tell them you want to activate the “sidekick data plan” (1$/day unlimited data). DO NOT TELL THEM YOU HAVE iPhone. (tell them sidekick or HTC smartphone if they persist).

as for phone calls remember that the SIM also has free incoming calls. you can fwd your skype # or cellphone to the new number (charges may apply) or use http://jajah.com that turns outgoing calls into incoming calls for about 2cents/min.

If you are one of the lucky ones who have a http://grandcentral.com account you can use Grand dialer on your iphone to do the same thing that jajah does but for free.

LINK: Traveling to the US with Rogers

Not the cheese shop sketch
Man walks into a mobile phone store.
Ouch!
No, let’s do that again. This time without the faintest hint of a joke.
Man walks into a 3UK retail store on Princes Street in Edinburgh.
“I’d like to buy a prepaid mobile broadband SIM card please”.
“I’m sorry, but we don’t sell those.”
How do they stay in business? I want to know the secret to making money without sales! Just don’t expect me to blog it when I find out…

Har har it’s funny because everybody knows how easy it is to find prepaid data cards.

Er wait, hold the phone^*, everyone knows you can find _what_ in Europe?

£10 per 1 GB or £25 for 7GB prepaid is the going rate btw (taxes included).

Prepaid data. Data by the pound, stick it in any device, like a £49.99 prepaid mobile broadband dongle, pay for the data only as you use it. A startling invention. Due any decade now in Canada.

File under: business models we’d like to see.

^{*Hold the phone – geddit?}

Here are a few more data points we measured ourselves from a few spots across Eastern Canada this past weekend (best speed of 3 test runs reported):

Toronto: 986/340 kbps dowload/upload, latency: 270ms
Quebec City: 260/287 kbps download/upload, latency: 189ms
Halifax Airport, Bridgewater, Lunenburg: no 3G service, latency: infinite

Bridgewater/LeHave on EVDO rev A dongle: 111 kbps, latency: 999ms (consistently laggy off the charts latency)

As measured in Toronto via speedtest.net:

Some thoughts:

1. We now know why the call the east coast is known as “GSM hell”. Bragg Communications, good on you if you can fix wireless out east.

2. Rogers 3G effective 3G bandwidth appears to be (more than) cut in half since just last april and before the iPhone, N95 launch. We would be happy if someone can prove us wrong, but from the same test locations, peak bandwidth has dropped from well over 2Mbs to now less than a 1Mbs (=1000 kbps)

A frustrated Rogers planner a while back told wirelessnorth.ca a story a while back. That try as they might it, it was habitually a beat-your-head against a wall challenge to convince the old-salt network managers to believe data usage would, yes virginia, one day take off. Overwhelming evidence of both ATT’s one year headstart on the iPhone, and Europe’s skyrocketing mobile broadband usage not withstanding. Seems big red is feeling the pain of short sightedness now. And passing the pleasure on to you. Assuming you can connect in the first place.

Mohamed said that wireless data pricing will “evolve” as Rogers subscribers begin using their phones for more than making voice calls – a trend expected to gain traction once Apple Inc.’s iPhone is made available to Canadians through Rogers on July 11….

“You will see more value in our pricing as we go forward,” Mohamed said today at a telecom conference in Toronto.

Rogers and other Canadian wireless operators have been criticized for charging subscribers some of the highest data rates in the developed world.

At WirelessNorth.ca we’re cautiously optimistic that Rogers is finally be at the cusp of embracing 21st century mobile trends. Rogers insiders have been whispering for a while that data pricing would be coming down when the time was right. Nonetheless we await to hear what exactly means “evolved” and “value”.

And then, in other news from “the more things change” department, the Star also reports that “While Rogers has yet to reveal how much it will cost Canadians to own an iPhone, executives have said they are not fans of unlimited plans such as those offered with the iPhone in the U.S. by AT&T Inc.”

We also know already that Rogers is also not a big fan of AT&T’s idea of “only” a 2-year contract either.

I had secretly hoped that Rogers would unveil some sort of new pricing scheme, something that would be a preview of the monthly pricing for the upcoming iPhone. No such luck.

The N95, which was first released in March of 2007 (just over a year ago), is a fine phone. Everyone I know who has had one in the past year has loved it. In typical Nokia style, it is very hacker friendly as it runs Symbian, and you can install everything from games to your own webserver on it.

It is no secert: The N95 is a killer phone that looks great and we all wish we could have. It easily rivals the iPhone in everything except popularity, although the 10 million N-Series phones Nokia sold last quarter isn’t so bad.

When the phone is available next week, it will come with a 3-year contract as a bonus when you buy a 20$ a month add-on pack on top of any voice plan you want. Under the typical Vision plans you can get Video Streaming, Audio Streaming and a slew of other Vision features. The executives I spoke to weren’t terribly clear about how the plan would stack, but this is what I was able to gather.

1. Pick any voice plan
2. Add on a 20$ a month pack that includes
   • Unlimited Email (restricted to Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc,. no POP)
   • 2500 SMS Messages
   • “A couple hundred MMSs”
   • Unlimited Web Browsing
   • Free 3-year contract
3. If you want to use GPS, you can either pay for Rogers Telenav product or you can use Nokia Maps, but data is pay-per-use for the non-Rogers application. The executive I spoke to quoted that the pay-per-use data would be at 1.5c/kb.
4. On a 3-year contract, most of the Vision features get included.
5. If you don’t want the 20$ addon pack mentioned above, you can just get the 7$/month unlimited web-browsing addon.
6. The phone will be priced at $399 on a 3-year contract

So, it didn’t happen. I didn’t get my revolution in pricing. They didn’t say “60$ a month for 1000 minutes and unlimited data usage on the device”, instead I was left more confused than ever. This application is pay-per-use, but this one is a flat fee. Application X is free, but you pay for its Data. Unlimited Email is included, but you can only use specific providers.

The list goes on. You are all used to it, we all think it is normal. I, however, have been helping my mother shop for a phone the last few weeks, and I can tell you that most people still can’t navigate these options.

By simplifying plan pricing, Rogers, Bell or Telus could make it much easier for people to buy new devices and, most likely, start using more and more services. As it is, pricing is still very unclear and has not improved in years. I am not complaining about actual data rates here, I am complaining about the daunting pricing structures.

The question is: Has Rogers twisted Apple’s arm and will they offer similarily confusing options for the iPhone? Will the Canadian iPhone come with Exchange support, undercutting the lucrative corporate email market that Rogers, Telus and Bell all specifically protect (by limited what email accounts you can get email from on cheaper plans), and will all applications fall in a single, large (or unlimited) data bucket the way pricing has been set for the iPhone all over the world, or will billing be segmented by Application. Will rogers try to put iPhone users on to their Telenav product, and charge per-use for the iPhone’s built in maps application?

The answer should be an obvious “No”. Of course Apple will demand a similar pricing scheme for the iPhone in Canada as they have negotiated in other countries. I hope that is the case, but if so, it really seems odd that Nokia is getting such a bad deal, so close to the launch of the iPhone.

My guess is that this discombobulated pricing is the result of internal politics. The Vision plans seem to come from a different group than other applications and options, and I imagine the same could be said for Blackberry and other Smartphone plans. Consolidated and clearer pricing may require not just a new vision for Rogers, but serious organzational changes.

• It’s really great to be connected anywhere. And the device works most anyplace (in the city) you can get a cell signal.
• Celular broadband is immeasurably better than rogers/bell Wimax-like “portable” internet.
• It’s fast. Or at least fast enough to be indistinguishable from wired broadband for general websufing
• You immediately want a smaller/lighter notebook to take with you everywhere. I have 3+lb 13″ notebook. I now want something smaller.
• The device works quite well in streetcars, buses, taxis if you can balance a laptop on your knee in those places (see above)
• Smart phones and RIMs are nice, but something with a real keyboard and just enough screen to show a whole webpage is even better.
• The days of cheap, paperback sized micro-laptops are coming. With 3G, these are going to sell like crazy.
• Unlike in other countries, 3G data plans are still not quite cheap enough for the mass market in Canada. But they may be worth it already for you.
• The pricing of the devices by the big 3 is all wrong. $399 + activation fee without a 3 year contract is ridiculous. Signing a 3 year contract on a data card doesn’t make any sense at all because the devices and networks are changing too quickly. In other parts of the world, dongles go for free with a 1 yr contract. And the carriers sell them by the wheelbarrow load.
• In Canada, Telus has the best plans and pricing but Rogers as Canada’s only GSM/HSPA carrier (sigh) is compatible with more devices, like you can get an unlocked data card for cheap on eBay (hint). HSPA devices take SIM cards just like GSM phones.
• Soon though it won’t matter. The new EeePC from Asus or others (the whole micro PC) will only cost $399. And it will come with HSPA or EVDO built in.
• It’s wonderful to go anywhere and bring your own connection with you.
• Wifi in general becomes much less important. (and works great at conferences)
• No more hunting for open wifi and minutes of frustration trying to connect to flaky base stations.
• You IT department is in big trouble.
• Want to surf facebook, monster.com, or anything else at work and not have your web use monitored? Just bring your own connection. This will be increasingly prevalent as the price of devices and plans relentlessly falls.

ABI research forecasts global celular 3G modem sales to grow from 5M 2006 to 68M by 2012. Compare this with 65M wifi units sold last year

Play with it yourself. Recommended.

Alec Saunders had a great post earlier this week on the subject Talking Turkey on Canadian Data.

“The answer, of course, is price elasticity. Because the cost of mobile data is so high, Canadians automatically use their data plans much more conservatively than folks in many other parts of the world. We don’t surf the mobile web, stream video, or upload photos from our mobile phones. “

Devices are also a problem. With the exception of blackberry, Canada has also long been a country of hand-me-down handsets from the rest of the world. Notheless, through whatever factors, not only are Canadians getting screwed, but even the carriers are missing out on opportunity.

How can we improve mobile usage in Canada? How can the carriers themselves make more money on data?

1. Better pricing. $35 is not a reasonable price for uploading a single picture to facebook (true story). Make the prices reasonable and the consumers will come in droves.

   Predictable pricing. Even more important than how much the pricing is, make it at leat predictable. Narrow-gardens where some apps are arbitrarily free and others run up your bill 30-50$/MB doesn’t cut it. Consumers are terified to click on apps or links on their phone because they have no idea what it will cost them.

2. Let consumers choose which apps they want to use, which content they want to view. Trust me, the carrier marketing department does not actually know which youTube vids and applications all the kids will want to see next week.
3. Be Open! foster, open and nourish access to both on and off-deck content. Open markets are great. Open markets pick the winning content automatically. Winning content drives usage. Usage drives revenues. This is how it works.
4. Sell better devices. Device makers, content platforms find other/direct ways to get better phones in the hands of consumers
5. Developers. Make better, more usable apps. Focus on a set of devices, create good experiences, share your tips with the community.
6. advertising / education to drive usage and awareness of what you can do with new mobile services, new devices.

And probably a few more too. What would you add?

$10 for an extra GB is also kindof funny considering that Rogers charges $50/MB of overage after the first 10MB of usage on their standard Vision plan. One Gigabyte equals 1024 Megabytes.

1GB of outside internet traffic on a PC card = $65
1GB of outside internet traffic on a standard rogers vision phone plan = 1024 – 10 = 1014MB x $50 = $50,700

Of the two plans, I’d recommend the former. *cough*

According to Alec Saunders, there is an option for not quite the same plan but something close to it if you ask a customer service rep the right questions:

Tom – I saw the same 1, 2, 3 GB plans you did, and phoned Rogers customer service. I explained that I had a sophisticated phone with a 5 megapixel camera, and wanted a suitable dataplan to go on it. The rep suggested a 1 GB plan for $65. I asked if this was the same as the HSPA card plan, and she said no. She wouldn’t sell me the 2 or 3GB plan. Still, it beats the tar out of the old $100 for 200M plan I had on my Blackberry.

An HSPA phone like the N95 with a good plan the ability to “tether” or share it’s internet connection is one way to get the best of both worlds. How to buy a Nokia n95 in Canada.

*Goodluck trying to surf the Rogers site on a firefox browser. It’s a strange animal to them, their web designers and layout engineers have never heard of the beast.

**It`s an excersise for the reader to determine how exactly how to dial 911 on a PC card in the event of an appropriate emergency.

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Just a few days before the event was scheduled, I was asked by a couple friends if I could fill in a slot at DemoCamp17 in Toronto on the subject of “The state of Wireless in Canada Sucks”. You can thank Dave Crow for the title, who made it up and the theme by preannouncing it on his blog. I could probably have also prepared another 5 minutes about what’s awesome in wireless in Canada (On WirelessNorth.ca we try to cover both where we can find them). However, this is not that latter presentation. Somewhere some body has a video of this presentation, which I hope I can YouTube up at some point. In the meantime, above is the slide share version.

The crowd, who were probably over generous, had this to say about it (Do you think the subject may have touched a nerve?):

More than 400 people packed the Toronto Board of Trade conference hall Monday night for DemoCamp, a loosely organized gathering of Web entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and technology enthusiasts. … But the real crowd pleaser of the night had to go to WirelessNorth webmaster Tom Purves’ fast-paced Ignite presentation on why the Canadian wireless industry “sucks.” – David George-Cosh, National Post “DemoCamp warms up Toronto Tech Crowd“

I caught you at DemoCamp yesterday. I was quite proud to realize that it was a local Torontoian who had published that graph on wireless rates around the world I saw everywhere last summer. I find Canada’s postion a bit ironic given that we were a leader in wireless communication back in the 1950s when were built the cross country microwave network. -JP

fantastic presentation at democamp the other day! nice standing ovations! – Albert Lai

Wirelessnorth.ca preso rocked. Next steps? -Jeremy Wright, B5Media

DemoCampToronto17 was a great success. @tpurves rocked the house with “Why the State of Wireless in Canada Sucks”. All presenters awesome. -Jay Goldman

Ignite presentation “The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks” from Tom Purves could be the best ignite presentation in the history of Democamp Toronto so far. Well done, Tom! – Libin Panwir