Wirelessnorth.ca

One of the last really severe pain-points for Canadian wireless sufferers subscribers have been roaming rates. It’s not uncommon for blackberry wielding business travelers we know in Canada to face roaming bills upwards of $1000 a month. It looks like there may be, finally, a Canadian-based roaming service alternative. Reader Anthony A writes to us about roammobility.com :

I came across this on twitter today and a Vancouver company, Roam Mobility has launched a global roaming service for Canadian and US travelers.

Besides low roaming rates they offer free incoming calls in over 60 countries like but got me excited was the free incoming in the USA. I did a bit reading on their site and you get a USA and UK number to use while traveling.

The price seems reasonable and they also offer new Motorola world phones if you don’t want to unlock yours or don’t have a GSM phone that works globally. I did notice that they didn’t offer data, so I contacted them and they said that the service will be available in 6 weeks. Their reason for not offering data now is because they are still trying to ensure their data roaming is at least 50% than any other major carrier.

If their service is good and I can get the service before I travel, then roaming rates won’t seem so stressful anymore. I like the idea that I can have a phone which anyone can call me on and it won’t cost me anything while I’m away. I’ve been to Miami and London this year, where were these guys before? My bill from Miami alone was $270!

If anyone else has experience/success using these guy’s roaming packages let us know.

A recent trip to Italy really drove home the point of how useless our fancy mobile phone are the minute we step across a border. At the going rates from our carriers of $2/min, $1/sms, $12-$30/MB + GST/PST etc. you really have to want to use that phone to make it worthwhile. Or your company is paying the charges which in turn works out to a hell of a productivity tax on Canadian companies trying to do business globally.

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?).

Just in time for SXSW, The wise and awesome Jay Goldman has just posted an excellent survival guide for anyone on Rogers who is traveling in the US and even thinking of turning their phone on.

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

Canadian mobile shop Xtreme Labs Inc. kindly let WirelessNorth.ca know about some 3G speed testing results from their iPhone bandwidth app. It would have been good to know how consistent these speeds were, but on the average, Roger’s network scores high:

We found in the US that average download speeds of 841 Kbit/s compared poorly to Japan with download speeds of 1,213 Kbit/s but compared favorably to the UK where download speeds averaged 663 Kbit/s. Canada stands out at a respectable 1,314 Kbit/s.

Here’s the global averages:

Why we think this is interesting: 3G or 3.5G or whatever you want to call it, is starting to show some impressive bandwidth numbers. Impressive for a lot of media streaming applications. Plenty of data/media bandwidth to fill a small screen. Where 3G is still clearly hurting however is latency. Nearly half a second is not too snappy and maybe why real-time 2-way voice/video/gaming over IP applications are just not quite there yet for mobile.

What we need is LTE (2010 – 2012ish) which should even more bandwidth, but even more importantly, sub 100ms latency (depending on how far you are pinging etc.).

Link: What is the REAL speed of your 3G connection?

According to big red, hardly anybody (1.2% of subscribers) used more than a 1GB of data on their iPhone in their first 4 weeks of usage, with 95% using less than 500MB and 91.2% using less than 200MB. Rogers is keen to share the stats as a prelude to “right-sizing” their new lineup of data plans once the current $30/6GB special offer runs out.

These numbers are of course a little disingenuous. You would expect these numbers to climb over time as users adapt their behavior to the new capabilities of the 3G devices and as more useful applications are released to the iPhone store. One also wonders how much higher those figures would be if iPhone supported video or, if the iPhone had any reasonable battery life with 3G actually turned on… limitations that other/future devices will not always have.

So the bad news is Rogers is dropping their caps and raising pricing relative to the 30/6GB deal. The good news is, not by that much and consumers should see data bills that are a LOT more predictable, and the evil days of punitive $50/Megabyte pricing are over.

A Rogers email rep emailed us last night to say:

We’re extending the $30 6GB 3G smartphone plan until the end of September (for the Bold mostly but all 3G smartphones can add it). And we looked at that iPhone usage and thought once the promotion ends, we’d create new plans that are better suited to what we know customers use. These October 1 plans are for data devices consumer pricing (so BlackBerry, smartphones, air cards) and I note, Rogers is one of the few carriers in the world that permit tethering. So a preview of new pricing that goes into effect October 1: $15 for 2MB (essentially an email plan); $25 for 500 MB; $30 for 1GB; $60 for 3GB and $80 for 8GB

On top of this Rogers is introducing a $100 cap for all data bill overage [this is a defacto $100 unlimited plan then? -ed] and free SMS alerts to inform you when you are approaching your limits. Presumably this cap does not apply to roaming data use however, which is still a big scary gap in Rogers service plans for anyone who travels.

Nonetheless, predictable in territory data pricing is very good. Tethering is good. And hopefully all of this pricing will come down further with more competition in 2009.

This new openness as well as the current stop-gap $30/6GB plan is a good sign from Rogers. It’s a sign they are getting better at PR and being responsive to consumer outcry at some of their past practices.

Feels like should be giving our carriers such a hard time more often :)

Can we move on to extortionate roaming charges, long distance rates and per-minute billing then?

You may have heard of this one already, but Rogers is limited time offering of a $30 data plan for 6GB of usage. That’s a lot of usage. That’s 18 times more data than a comparable $30 for 300MB with Rogers offers on the blackberry. And even at high speeds, you’re going to need to do a lot of streaming, or torrenting or something, to hit a 6GB cap on a mobile device. Remember this is the plan that came of all the outcry created all over the press, the internets, and here too, over Rogers steep rates for the iPhone 3G. The 30/6GB plan is the one limited time only concession to the haters and pent-up frustrated Rogers customers out there.

There’s more than a few catches. But here’s why the catches don’t really matter:

Catch 1: it’s only on a three year plan. But the good news, the cancellation penalty for data plans is only $100 anytime in the next 3 years.

Catch 2: the plan goes away August 31st. We’re going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that Rogers is not going to come out with an even better offer the day after. More like the opposite.

Catch 3: You can’t even get an iPhone 3G or Blackberry Bold or other next gen 3G device yet to make it worth while. Ya, but you could get one later and hold on to the 30/60GB plan when you do. Ideally, you could go through all sorts of devices in the next 3 years but hang on to the 30/6GB plan if it’s still the best out there.

Catch 4: More competition is coming in just a year and they may have great offers too. Or they may not. 30/6GB is pretty cheap for data and after paying off industry Canada, your new entrants may or may not be able to beat it. And then cancellation only costs $100 and you can still say bye bye Rogers.

Last catch: the charge is not $100 if you are also canceling a voice plan or other contract at the same time. In that case, according to the fine print, you could be on the hook for a standard $400 contract penalty PLUS the $100 data plan cancellation charge. Ouch. So if you might want to get out of it, this offer is best if NOT switching to Rogers for the first time and/or signing up for a whole new phone with it. Question your CSR carefully about that one.

The plan doesn’t work for data cards (too bad) but it is good for any smartphone including current/future blackberries if you have a personal blackberry as opposed to enterprise (gotta keep milking those enterprise clients). We’re unclear on thethering with this plan, that would be wonderful to get away with, but we’d say don’t necessarily get your hopes up.

Anyway if you are an existing Rogers Customer, or not otherwise signing up for a new 3 year voice contract, you might want to jump on this. This little plan could be like the next mythic legendary grandfathered $20 fido unlimited offer that a select few locked in to and hung on for years.

Recommended.

We should all protest Rogers more often…

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.

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…)

Chris Sorensen at The Star has the story that Rogers will be revamping their data pricing in time for the iPhone.

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.

Two horror stories, this time it’s courtesy of Bell. Customers stunned by massive phone bills

…customers have been left reeling, and fuming, after receiving cellphone bills from Bell Canada for tens of thousands of dollars even though they believed they had “unlimited” Internet access on the devices. Khalil Haddad, owner of an Ottawa salon, was charged $10,342 last month after his son used his phone to surf the Web. Jennifer Rundle, an Ottawa hairstylist and student, was sent a $24,791 bill for similar reasons. Both thought they were paying an extra fee for unlimited Internet access…

What’s the worst you’ve seen on a Canadian phone bill? We spoke with one aquaintance recently, a busy independent consultant who traveling at least once a month between cthe US and Canada. She was proud, almost boasting in fact that by juggling plans and curtailing roaming as much as possible, she’d finally gotten her personal blackberry bill down to less than $750 a month.

Our wireless industry is a heck of a tax on growing a business in Canada.