So just don’t buy an iPhone
Apple Inc. will not be selling the hotly awaited iPhone in its six Canadian stores when it is released this Friday, leaving Rogers Communications Inc. and its Fido subsidiary to sell the device on their own.
“The iPhone 3G will be available in Canada from Rogers and Fido,” said Simon Atkins, spokesperson for Apple. He declined to elaborate.
The Cupertino, Calif.-based company broke the news during a private conference call on Monday evening, according to AppleInsider.com. The website said Apple was “disgusted” with the rates Rogers is charging on the iPhone, which has prompted nearly 50,000 people to join a protest at ruinediphone.com. An Apple store manager last week confirmed to CBCNews.ca that staff were “very disappointed” by the cellphone company’s rates and that Apple was keeping a tally of complaints.
The only way this budding revolt will get off the ground is to not buy an iPhone. There is no way mobile phone rates in Canada will change without big hitters swinging. Piss off Apple, maybe something will happen. Don’t appeal to Jobs’ goodness, by asking him to help, he doesn’t have any say on the rates. But we can make him mad, so he takes it out on Rogers. Perhaps that is what we need. A big stick in the form of Apple. If this whole thing shakes out with Rogers slightly decreasing the contract length or terms it is a failure. It needs to reduce the overall price of wireless data services in Canada.
Oh an in other news Bell Mobility will begin charging customers 15 cents per incoming text message on Aug. 8. Telus Mobility is moving to the same billing practice effective Aug. 24. And given you can’t control who sends you texts, I think this is just another brick in the wall of contempt for consumers which is being built by the Canadian telecom oligopoly. Ironically, Rogers is NOT going to charge for incoming text messages. Yay!
I think Bell, Telus and Rogers have passed the Banks as the number 1 target of my scorn.
Hat tip to Angry Robot for the top graphic.
I wonder if I can get out of my Bell contract because of this text messaging? I mean when a company changes their policy on a feature, it should in essence null the contract if I don’t agree with it. Specially when I have no control over it. Then again…who the heck am I going to switch to? Telus blows, Rogers blows, Bell blows, all those pay as you go places…well they’re more of a rip off than anyone else. Fido? Is Fido the best option? God help us all…
..and Fido IS rogers.. ;)
I already get charged for incoming text messages on Telus, hooray.
Fido is rogers… yes… But my personal experience with the company who still maintains their own brand, call centers, and billing processes has been far better than what I have heard from everyone else.
We’re just going to have to wait for the auction to go through to see some real changes in the market here.
Holy crap, I have openid?
@wintr apparently eh :P
Yeah I was hoping the spectrum auction would help but the big 3 ate up most of the spectrum available. Where I think you’ll see some benefit is in smaller regional areas, I highly doubt anyone is going to be able to roll out a new national system to benefit consumers.
And Chris I doubt you can. What really rubs me the wrong way is that they are saying “ohhhh such a huge increase in text messages” but really how big in bits is a freakin text message. Makes an email enabled phone/blackberry type device look better. But then you have the data charge issues. So if you just use it for email and forget about surfing that is likely as good as it is going to get.
What amazes me about being charged for text messages is that the actual data sent and received for a text message is actually the packet size used for pinging the tower, which your phone does on a regular basis. I think its quite disgusting that a phone company would charge you for receiving a message when such little bandwidth is actually used.
I especially love this:
The rest is here http://www.physorg.com/news129793047.html
Thats hilarious. At 5p that is about 10 cents, but I don’t think Brits get charged to receive them too…? They do however get charged per minute for local landline calling, which I found surprising when I was over there and one of the reasons mobile phones took off faster than in North America.