In Canada we have a wonderful and friendly company called Rogers. They have a warm and fuzzy monopoly on GSM access in Canada thanks to their acquisition of Fido, which used to be the only other choice and is now just a slight variation of Rogers itself.
They've now released new data plans which are of no use whatsoever for me and my
n95-3, but they will be able to pretend that they're being competitive if the government asks, and that's what is important.
Basically, they've restructured their generic data plans to start from $65 for 1 GB and now if you go over it doesn't cost you $1000 /GB any more, you just move up to the next tier at $75 for 2 Gb, and so on until you get to 5GB for $100 and then each additional gig is. They actually sell this as a 3G PC card plan, but if you manage to get a rep with half a clue, they can apply this to your phone. Now if I actually needed 1GB or more, that would seem almost reasonable, but I don't and that would more than double my phone bill.
They've also released an "unlimited" on-phone browsing plan which is amazingly only $7/ month and includes video calling. The catch with this is that it's apparently limited by IMEI whitelist to their own line of phones and is also restricted to WAP browsing on their browsers, although some reports have suggested that it will work with Opera or the Symbian browser. They've also released a $20 add on pack which bundles their internet with a bunch of standard features.
If you use any other app or a phone that they don't like, they specifically mention Google Maps as a banned app, you're back to their normal rate which is....
wait for it....
5 cents /kb.
Yep, that's roughly $5 per web page and $150 per mp3 or $50,000 /GB.
So long story short,
N95 users who jump on board could be in for a bit of sticker shock if they think they're getting unlimited service. Hopefully a real plan will be available sometime soon. Here's a link if you want to laugh at a large IT company actually pushing access to individual websites as a feature:
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And here is the link to their generic data services:
Rogers.com-Wireless, Digital Cable, Hi-Speed Internet, Bundles
I really hope they can get their act together and offer something reasonable.
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