Canadian iPhone: Get Less, Pay More – Rogers plan comes with low cap, 3 year contract….

In: broadbandreports.com|Site Feeds|VoIP

30 Jun 2008

Canadian consumers are finally getting the iPhone a year later than their friends to the south. However, customers are annoyed by how expensive and restrictive Rogers’ service plan is. Not only must users sign a mandatory three year contract, but for the same $75 AT&T customers pay, Rogers users get a third less calling time, half as many text messages, and a 750MB cap. From a report on Fortune:

Rogers claims that its top data plan 2 GB per month for $115 is enough to download 16,000 webpages. But users point out that a single Facebook page can account for 1.2 MB, which reduces browsing from 16,000 pages per month to 1,600. “It s like they re deliberately driving customers away,” wrote wolfscribe on CBCnews. “I ll keep my money, ride out the contract and look for a new provider.”

iPhone users in the States have traditionally used nearly five times the data consumed by average AT&T subscriber, and double the average smart phone user. The full rate plan is attached, and shows that Rogers users have their choice of 400MB ($60), 750MB, ($75) 1GB ($100) or 2GB ($115) caps. Ah, the benefits of limited competition.

This should surprise nobody given the way Rogers runs their terrestrial network. The operator was one of the first cable operators in North America to implement caps and overage fees (charging as much as $5 per gigabyte), and has a history of throttling both VPN and encrypted network traffic to keep P2P users at bay.
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