No unlimited plan, thank you
There’s been a lot of uproar about the Canadian iPhone plans from Rogers. There are some legitimate complaints: the three year contracts, the 150 minutes for $80 “value” plan, and the overpricing of data.
One thing that I don’t think is a legitimate request is people’s demand for unlimited data. There’s no such thing as unlimited plans, there’s only plans where you don’t know what the limit is. A year ago, I posted a (somewhat silly) rant about the unlimited iPhone plans, which I still stand by.
“Unlimited” sucks. Demand reasonable bandwidth caps or cheap per-gigabyte rates.
Jul 8 2008
4:06 pm
How can you say unlimited sucks? How would you feel if you had a cap on your regular internet bandwidth? You’d shit bricks!
And unlimited data is VERY doable, if we lived a bit more south into Seattle, they can get an unlimited data plan for their iPhones, why can’t we? Oh, because Canada is so large that they’re coverage is much greater? That’s a BS argument, because areas that have an extremely sparse population have no coverage anyways! If the US can do it, we should be able to do it twice as well. The ONLY reason we have no unlimited data is because of the monopoly Rogers and Telus have on the market, and with AT&T coming here soon, that monopoly will be crushed and I can finally tell the largest anti-consumer mobile company, Rogers, to go die in a fire.
Jul 8 2008
10:15 pm
Here’s why unlimited is necessary: most (as in 90%) of people don’t know how to judge if they’ve got the correct amount of bandwidth. In other words, they don’t know how to do a capacity plan for their own usage.
I know for a fact that I have NO IDEA how much I’d use. Clearly it’s not infinite, but at 35 cents per megabyte (or whatever the current rate is), I’d be scared shitless to use the device. And that doesn’t make for a pleasant user experience.
I won’t be getting an iPhone, nor any other data-plan-required-to-be-useful phone. Not until there’s an alternative to Rogers with realistic prices.
Jul 9 2008
12:28 am
Shawn: we all have caps on our regular internet bandwidth. I’d like to know what mine is, actually, rather than them pretend it’s unlimited. Rogers’ data plans are horribly overpriced, but the problem isn’t the fact they tell you what the limit is. If their limits were more like AT&T’s in the States (their unlimited probably won’t cut you off until like 20GB or something) then people would be happy.
Oldguy: You’re right – the same way many people don’t know how many minutes they’d use. They’d either have to get assistance with rate plans, have automatic upgrades to the next plan, or have a non-insane per gigabyte charge (something like $5/GB, which you could explain to them is thousands of photos.) If Rogers put customers first, they’d do these things, instead of having plans that charge like $10/GB for the first 2GB, then $500/GB for the “overage” GB. Overage should be cheaper, not more expensive!
Jul 9 2008
7:56 pm
In total honesty, I’ve maxed my Up/Down bandwidth for months at a time with nary a peep from either Telus, Shaw, or Uniserve.
That said, I recognized that bandwidth == money in operating and maintenance costs alone. But from the information I have regarding the operating costs of Telus the cost of SMS, data, et al are no where near as low as they could be. SMS itself is astronomically over-priced. $5/GB _is_ insane.
Shawn: not to mention that the Canadian government all but paid for the infrastructure for sparsely populated areas.
I’m fairly alarmed. Bell has a strong history of fucking the consumers out east. With this obvious collusion with Telus and ever-dwindling value per dollar I’m thinking phone plans out here aren’t going to improve much.
Jul 10 2008
11:51 am
So Rogers just dropped their price to $30 for 6GB. Let’s run the numbers:
Their network was upgrade last year from EDGE to HSPA, and their stated “real world” data rate is 3.4Mbps. Let’s assume that there are 10 bits in a byte (start and stop bits added), so that’s 0.34 megabytes per second.
Let’s see… 6GB = 6144 MB, so when downloading at .34 MB/sec, it would take me 6144/.34 = 18,070 seconds to use up my capacity.
In a 31 day month, that means I’d be able to average 583 seconds per day of usage.
That would be just a touch under 10 minutes.
There’s your capacity plan. True, I’d be downloading and then reading, but it definitely means I’m not able to sit on a park bench and watch YouTube videos all day long…
Rogers sucks — and because I’m in Canada, that means no iPhone for me.
As for the fact that people over the limit have not typically been charged for the overage, that’s based on landline usage. Rogers’ business model is to charge 35 cents per MB when you exceed your limit.
So here’s some more math: .34MB per second means roughly 12 cents per second once you’ve exceed your limit. Or, to put it another way, a minute of download would be $7.20
I’m sure all consumers run the numbers, right? After all, people are not generally stupid, right? I mean, we’re not all slaves to fashion are we?
And don’t get me started about the fact that I can’t buy the phone and have to commit to a 3-year plan. I have NEVER been on a long-term cell phone contract and NEVER will be; it’s literally a case of selling your soul to the devil. Okay, it’s more like long-term-leasing your soul to the devil. But I’m sure you get the idea.
Unlimited plans with equipment you buy is the only way to go.
Jul 10 2008
12:01 pm
Here’s an interview with Rogers about their HSPA service, introduced last year and now serving 60% of Canada’s population or something like that). Figure you’d like to see that my number aren’t made up. Also note how the guy squirms when he’s asked about the cost of data plans — he doesn’t even answer the question, but says “our $5 introductory video calling plan is a good deal”.
http://todmaffin.com/rogers3g
Jul 10 2008
1:15 pm
Most people I talk to with unlimited data say they use less than 1GB per month. With the App Store I highly suspect I’ll be using more than that. That said, without multi-tasking, and considering the battery drain of 3G data transfer, it’s hard to saturate your download on one of these things. I suspect 6G will be unlimited for almost everyone.
As for the 3-year contracts, it really bothers me too – I’ve been off contract for years. That said, it’ll be about 3 years before Telus launches a GSM network that I could consider switching to, so until then it might be worth the $500 or so savings to give up my non-option to change networks for 3 years.
Jul 12 2008
1:21 pm
Interesting note: Rogers is allowing you to just add the $30 / month data plan on top of your current plan if you switch to the iPhone. The total added cost for my wife was + $30 monthly (on top of our sub $100 couples plan) + $199 for the phone itself. And she loves the phone ;-)