A topic near and dear to my heart and wallet, being a Canuck myself. Data rates up here are, well, ridiculous. Third World, in fact . . .
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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