I sent Rogers customer service the following email:
Re:
http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wireless-products/iphone_voice_data_packagesyou must be joking? those rates are terrible. why does canada have the
worst data plans in the world?you”ve just killed the iphone in canada, congrats.
And they responded with:
Dear Hugh McGuire,
Thank you for taking the time to write to us, we appreciate your use of
online customer service.In your recent email, you have informed us that our newly released
iPhone 3G plans are a disappointment.We are sorry to hear that our iPhone 3G voice and data packages value
are less than you were expecting. We would like to point out that they
do offer more data and airtime than our traditional packages and they
also come with the added features of bonus text messages and visual
voicemail. However, we appreciate that this release has come with
expectations from our customers.Each carrier has a different pricing strategy. Rogers has designed a
pricing structure that offers high-value, flexible voice and data
packages so that Canadians can make the most of their iPhone 3G
experience.To fully appreciate everything this device has to offer (phone, iPod and
Internet in one 3G device), our price plans include both voice and data.
We have a wide selection of high value, flexible plans to meet your
needs.? The majority of carriers offering iPhone 3G worldwide do not have
unlimited plans for this device. Some carriers have implemented a ?soft
cap? so the plan isn?t truly ?unlimited?. For example, in France the
soft cap is 500MB where we have a plan that includes 4 times that amount
in your bucket. Unlimited plans could end up costing you more for what
you don?t use.? Based on reports that the average usage for the first generation
iPhone was less than 100MB per month, our iPhone 3G plans more than
accommodate the vast majority of customers. Rogers?s customers get 4
times the data on our $60 entry level plan (400 MB) and 20 times the
data on our most comprehensive plan.At Rogers we are always aiming to improve service to better meet the
needs of our customers and we appreciate your feedback. Your comments
will be passed along for further review and consideration.We truly hope that you continue to stay loyal to Rogers Wireless however
should you feel that you need to make that move elsewhere. We kindly ask
that the account holder contact our customer care centre by phone at
your convenience. You may contact our Wireless Customer Relations
department toll free from a landline at 1-888-764-3771 or by dialing
*611 from your wireless phone. Our Hours of Operations are Monday to
Friday from 8AM to 9PM and on Saturday from 8AM to 6PM, EST.Thank you for contacting Rogers. We appreciate your comments. We are
pleased to have been able to address your inquiry. For additional
information please visit our website at www.rogers.com.For future email correspondence with respect to this e-mail, please
quote reference number 38955822Regards,
Patty T.
Rogers Online Customer Service
http://www.rogers.com
Canned response. Nice.
Do they honestly think we don’t know what plans they are getting the US or UK?
Make sure you sign the petition (it is picking up a lot of steam).
News: iPhone piracy in Canada, Rogers robs Canadians again…
The outrage is obvious and visible. With users on Twitter and elsewhere so angry and upset that you could cut the tension from the air.
Rogers’ proposed fees for iPhone packages – Pssst these packages are only for those idiots willing to sign up…
It’s side-splitting that all of you are just picking up on the fact that we have some of the worst data rates in the world. We’ve been stuck there for quite a while, long before the iPhone even existed, and all of a sudden all the hipsters are complaining that they won’t have enough bandwidth to download Google maps so that they can find an overpriced cafe nearby? Brilliant. I couldn’t make this stuff up.
Rather than ‘having killed the iPhone in Canada’, which seems to be a cause strangely near and dear to many people’s hearts, where has the outrage been over the fact that they killed Canadian innovation and competitiveness in mobile and wireless communication for other applications a long time ago? Does anyone really believe that Rogers / Fido offering a better data plan will do anything to improve the Canadian telecom landscape, while we still have a total monopoly in GSM space?
Many jobs and opportunities are lost every day directly because we have zero government oversight (and zero citizen input) on how any of this infrastructure gets built out. Expensive iPhone plans should be the least of our concerns, IMNSHO.
i’m not sure what your point is steve, except maybe you liked U2 waaay before anyone else and they’re shit now, but at the risk of being pedantic, i’ve been outraged about Canada’s murderous approach to innovation and competitiveness in mobile and wireless communication for a while, as soon as i found about it, which, sidesplitting hipster i may be, was a while ago, see:
https://hughmcguire.net/2007/04/10/canada-mobile-data-access/
https://hughmcguire.net/2007/08/01/press-and-canadian-mobile-data/
but, other than displaying potential ignorance, what does it matter whether i found out & am outraged about it now or 3 years ago? or rather, wouldn’t you prefer that i be outraged about it now than not at all?
and expensive iphone plans are expensive because data plans are expensive. which is why i said: “why does canada have the worst data plans in the world?”
Whoa Steve. Whoa. I’ve been in IT since you were in diapers. I, and most of the people who are up in arms about the iPhone pricing plans, are well aware of Canada’s rich history of wireless non-competition. We were hoping (against hope) that the iPhone, in combination with the spectrum auction, and recent data cost reductions from Bell & Telus, might be the straw that broke that broke Rogers back.
By the way, I agree with the NSHO portion of your post.
I never doubted your ‘outrage’. My curiosity pertains to the timing of everyone’s efforts on what is, essentially, a useless / pointless fight (better mobiles data rates from Rogers . I know you’ve blogged about this stuff in the past, Hugh, but what pushed you over the edge to write a letter now, as opposed to when you saw this. Why is everyone getting so worked up over the inability of a long-failed infrastructure to support yet another closed, proprietary, top-down device? What if Rogers offered an amazing plan to rival the rest of world? What if we had all the mobile data access we wanted? What then? We’d stily have a one-corporation mobile network with zero transparency, only now Apple and Rogers would be making slighty more profit.
More harmful to innovation and creativity than Rogers inability / unwillingness to adapt, or the iPhone’s closed / opaque / fascist nature, lies the deep-rooted idea that we have to work within the constraints of the current infrastructure. This defeatist mindset of “Aw, Rogers plan sucks. Let’s petition Rogers to make them suck less!” is, of course, far too widespread to ever convince people who use mobile networks – us – of something as foolhardy as the idea that we should actually own these networks ourselves. Therein lies the core of my argument.
I don’t think you’re a hipster. Side-splitting, at times, maybe.
No, I would prefer that you be outraged about something completely different – see above. Of course, your rage is yours to direct wherever you want.
Congratulations.
Yeah ok – and then what? We get more competitive data plans that are still within the structure of a hegemonic communications space? If so, you can keep it. I’d rather see data (and voice) prices go through the roof if that meant that it would drive us to take ownership of our own networks.
“Brilliant. I couldn’t make this stuff up.”
Actually, you do make this stuff up with your usual completely distorted analysis and generalizations.
There’s such high and mighty venom in every one of your comments I see, I wonder why you even still read any of us.
Sorry if I can get outraged at data plans AND would prefer ownership or networks but I have yet to see any real road map to achieve that so trying to push Rogers a bit is what I do for the moment.
Maybe if you dropped the “genius/sage on a hill” tone once in a while, you could convince more people of the grand ideas you think about.
That’s great that you got that out of your system, Patrick. Looks like it was brewing for a long time. Feel better now? :)
Would you care to elaborate on this distorted analysis and generalization you just made?
Seeing as how I almost never comment on blogs, you must be following me very closely to keep such a tally. I’m flattered, truly.
Who is this mythical “us” of whom you speak? Have you put together a coalition of the unwilling? Do you have a posse?
Ah, finally something in your comment that actually has to do with the topic at hand – even if it did make me giggle. Some time-saving advice for you: If you are going to wait for other people to make roadmaps for the things you want to happen, you will wait a very, very long time. This applies nicely to “fixing what’s wrong what Canadian telecom”. You, and people like you, are in a very privileged position in that you have the resources, intelligence and drive to help create a movement to radically change the infrastructure that we’re trying to work around. Whether it’s public ownership of the space, fiercer competition within a new private market, or something in between that we haven’t even imagined yet, you are the best positioned to do something about it. Instead, though, you’ll whine and gripe about expensive iPhone plans. Just keep on picking at that low-hanging fruit. I, of course, should also do something about it… but then, I’m not the one complaining, am I? As I mentioned before, I’d like to see Rogers data plans get more expensive, not cheaper.
Ahh, just when I was getting my hopes up.
1 – I wish I could be a “sage on a hill”, but I’m sure it’s far less fun than it sounds. I’m also told I apparently don’t have the charisma for it. Can you believe that?
2 – I don’t need to convince anyone of anything, of course. Certain people understand that some things are so clearly better than their alternatives that they don’t need to be told so. Rather fortunately, most of those people spend more time thinking about stuff like sustainable development, open access and communal solidarity than they spend time idolizing shiny new gadgets or running after their next big paycheck.
3 – Why are you so angry about this? Harboring that much negativity can’t be healthy. You really shouldn’t take this stuff so seriously.
Besides, it’s just the Internet – it’s not even real.
be nice everybody.
@steve: out of curiosity (genuine, not facetious), who is your ISP?
also, for an elaboration on some of the reasons why i am pissed at rogers, and see:
https://hughmcguire.net/2008/06/29/what-are-you-worth/#comment-6364
@hugh: my isp is Radioactif.
Hugh, you had a great post about trolls and short answers and not getting into fights. Can’t seem to find it. Link?
i’m not sure if it’s relevant here, but i suspect this is the link you are looking for:
https://hughmcguire.net/2007/03/25/how-to-deal-with-difficult-people/
oh instead of risking getting mir tied up in this debate, here is my response to her:
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can tell you more explicitly what outrages me (and, note, I don’t and didn’t have any plans to buy an iphone): as someone who has been trying to harness technology in useful and socially constructive ways, with success or not (eg: librivox – making knowledge free and accessible in a new format; atwater media project – getting kids to discover the wonder of creation; datalibre – urging the government to make data about our lives available so that we can help improve our country; earideas – bringing intellectually stimulating audio to a wider audience), I am frustrated that the tools of innovation are getting blocked by a monopolistic, greedy pricing plan.
i don’t know what people can do with web enabled mobile devices, but there’s a good case that it will be a significant, maybe revolutionary change in how we interact with information. Certainly that is the impression i get from the bits of interesting tech reading I’ve been doing of late, the art that’s made me think most, and discussions I’ve had with people either thinking about or actually working in the interesting mobile space. and I (probably many others) have an intuition that the changes will make the web look archaic.
now, given my interest in technology has little to do with geewhiz gadgetry, and more with trying to do interesting/useful/constructive things with it, I am still pissed off at rogers. why?
because canada – or at least my canada – has been excluded from exploring and experimenting with the mobile web because data plans are exorbitant, and totally out of whack with the rest of the world. so if there are interesting and exciting things that might come out of the mobile web, the sorts of things I’d like to see (whatever they might be) or I would like to work on, they are not going to come out of canada because it’s just too expensive. they won’t come from friends of mine, they won’t come from me.
that sucks.
the buzz around the iphone/rogers plan (in my circles) was: finally, canada (rogers) will be forced to make reasonable data plans because there’s a big business to be had selling these gadgets. which is good for canadian gadget nuts, and at least encouraging for canadian innovation, because for the first time we won’t be totally excluded from maybe the most important area of communications innovation in the coming decade.
so, spoiled rich kids aside, that’s my concern, and why i was pissed at rogers. because we’ve been waiting for this innovation space to open, and finally thought it would, but it didn’t.
…
People get outraged about things that the perceive to have impacts on their own lives, or the lives they would like to live. I find it interesting to list the issues I have complained about over the past few years via email to governments etc. the ones I can remember include: copyright, renaming Park Avenue, the interdiction against the flower lady on Bernard Street, data plans. Probably there were others; but basically I’ve complained about encroachments on the actual place where I live, and on the space where I work.
Now perhaps I should get more pissed off about other things, but what can you do. One cannot manufacture outrage, it’s either there or it isn’t; if it’s there, it’s there for a reason, and probably worth doing something about.
I was looking at the rogers site before they had announced the iphone data plans, and did some calculations based on what Rogers would charge a PDA user on their “unlimited” plan if they downloaded a mere 25MB of data in the course of a month from a non-approved site…
http://foo.ca/wp/2008/06/11/enough-to-make-me-leave-telus/
Sadly, the iphone data plans aren’t a whole lot better, but they’re about as good as I’d expect from Rogers. With Telus I have a $15 unlimited data plan that’s really unlimited; I don’t have to restrict myself to facebook or google maps, or what have you. If Telus and Bell and others are doing it, why isn’t Rogers? Oh right, exclusivity. People want the iPhone, and they’d happily pay a dollar a minute to have it, as well as be locked in for three years. It’s silly.
Did you send your message to Apple as well?
Here’s my best guess on the Rogers iPhone plans from back in May 2008:
http://www.itinfusion.ca/wireless/my-best-iphone-rate-plan-guess/
I wasn’t too far off I don’t think. I would have been very surprised to get unlimited data, but I was hoping that they could at least drop the rates a bit…
Obviously $30 for unlimited (a la AT&T) is currently the holy grail. I certainly wasn’t expecting that… but maybe $50 or $60 for unlimited?
Here is an interesting article
http://blogues.cyberpresse.ca/technaute/peloquin/?p=348
I really don’t care if the iPhone is killed or not in Canada.
The “Open Moko” is much more interesting!
http://openmoko.com/
The Open Moko runs on “free as in freedom” software that you’re free to modify if you wish. You can also “hack” the hardware and it’s all quite legal. There will never be any “digital locks”.
It will make idiotic laws like the DMCA in the U.S. and Prentice’s Bill C-61 irrelevant. All kinds of little businesses can spring up who will legally be able to make changes to people’s Open Moko phones.
If our governments are going to give the full weight of the law to protect digital locks then it’s time to switch to software and electronic hardware that doesn’t have locks in the first place.
[…] and as an aside, all this has much to do with why I thought Steve’s comments on my iphone post were ridiculous or incurious or presumptuous or just dumb … there may be many people who […]