The Canadian press is all over the brutal mobile data rates Canadian carriers charge (compared with reasonable rates elsewhere). An editorial in the Gazette; an editorial in the Ottawa Citizen, now a big article in the National Post.
I agree with them, and I’ll wager that CanWest (who owns all three papers) has some big business plans involving mobile data.
Or maybe the editorial boards just *really* want iPhones.
good to see movement on this. however, shoddy shoddy reporting:
– “the only Canadian cellphone company technically compatible with the new gadget” (refering to Rogers) Um, what? The only iPhone feature that requires carrier “cooperation” is the visual message center, which any carrier can, technically, install. It is at the service level, so in their server centers, and not a network feature (meaning no work required on antennas etc)
– “This isn’t just about people sending their siblings snapshots of their kids, as in the TV ads for iPhone. There are significant productivity aspects to mobile access for business.” Classic example of the ridiculous mobile culture here. I venture that not only is it far far far more *important* for most people to send photos of their loved ones to each other than so-called “business applications, but also those people *would do more of it if the rates were reasonable*. Hello carriers!! Get your heads out of your asses and look at what is going on in the US, Australia, Europe, the world.
Mobile communication is NOT (just) a business application, a corportae expense. It is about people communciating. And by extorting corporations, they are missing the much much much larger market of “normal” people.
end rant. ;)
yeah… funny. “the internet is not *just* for emails, communicating with other humans, IM, saring photos, publishing text and finding information … it’s also useful!”