A quick jaunt around the ‘net shows me the $40 I pay Telus for 8Mb of data (which gets chewed up in nothing but email) would get me 200Mb with Vodafone in New Zealand (more if you factor exchange rates), and in the U.S. (the first carrier I checked) I would get UNLIMITED data for $40.

I’ve been meaning to post something about this for a long time, but have just recently started blogging, and ironically got a phone call just today from Telus Mobility’s ‘customer retention’ department, asking me how things were going. They do this when you’re not on a contract (didn’t hear from anyone for 3 years before my last contract expired July 07), to try and ensure you’re not about to jump ship.

After 2 minutes talking with the rep, he was agreeing with me that the data rates were way too high in Canada, but there was nothing he could do. He DID try to get me onto a different voice plan though, as they all do, because I’m still on a grandfathered Clearnet plan with per-second billing, caller-id and voicemail. Those were the days, eh? Funny how all the cell companies are only able to count in increments of 60 seconds – must be too hard on their 286′s.

What’s the real story here? IMHO, the Directors at all the Canadian telco’s are milking us dry for short-term gain. What they don’t seem to grasp (again, IMHO) is it WILL backfire and result in long-term pain. Innovation and infrastructure upgrades have taken a back seat to high data prices, strictly in the interest of making the bottom line look better so the stock price moves in the right direction. Mark my words, it’s going to hit them between the eyes someday soon in the next couple of years.

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So what's the real problem here? The rest of the world (most notably the elephant to the south) have leap-frogged us and are providing better service for less money (see above). It used to be because of Canadian geography (mostly) we had the most advanced telecom infrastructure in the world. Now all we have are de facto monopolies effectively suppressing mobile data use by keeping the prices high, and not reinvesting in infrastructure to support lower data rates (highly speculative on my part, but I believe this has some morsel of truth in it).

Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa has been leading the charge on this very topic in the media and blogosphere, and much more can be read on his blog - with a timely post just today. Industry Canada is forcing the issue somewhat with a portion of the wireless spectrum being reserved for new entrants (sorry Ted).

Will this be enough? Hard to say right now. With the iPhone coming, there is sure to be a LOT of people who will actually want to USE the device for surfing the 'net (heaven forbid). Rogers won't sell very many unless they come up with more attractive data pricing. Another very important point is mobile numbers are now portable between all carriers (land-line, wireless, and VoIP).

Last point before I hit the hay - why hasn't government done something about this before? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact Telus is giving them $35 UNLIMITED data plans (or so I'm told). No conflict there (I love a good conspiracy theory).

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