Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

As per CNet News.com:

Canadian cell phone carrier Rogers Communications is extending its iPhone data plan promotion another month, as it tries to figure out how best to price data plans for smartphone users, CBC reported Thursday.

[...]

A Rogers representative the company told the CBC the offer is being extending through September to allow buyers of the new BlackBerry Bold to take advantage of it. The Bold was introduced only week ago.

What’s interesting is the new data packages scheduled to be offered after this date: a $25/500MB and $30/1GB plan should show up sometime in October. I know at least one friend doesn’t want the $30 hit per month for his BlackBerry, so he sticks with the $15 email-only package. $5 can actually make the world of difference to some price-sensitive customers, especially the student audience being targeted in the coming months. Going down to an admittedly quite reasonable $25 plan might convince more people to pick up these devices. There will also be more plans available: $60/3GB and $80/8GB, along with a low-end $15/2MB offering to fool the really cheap customers into overages.

Additionally, even the lowest tier Rogers voice package ($20) paired with a $25 data plan would push ARPU to the magical $45/month required by business decisions and most data device hardware upgrades.

Of course, our voice plans are still gimped compared to the States, but colour me slightly more impressed.

Just before heading into my marketing exam this evening, I was checking Crackberry and HowardForums for the usual selection of news. What I found was actually an interesting exercise in branding, using the time-honoured technique of showing us an attractive girl in underwear.

Virgin Mobile Canada apparently has launched the BlackBerry Pearl 8130 on their service, which I believe is a first for a Canadian MVNO; generally only the non-virtual carriers in North America have established relationships with RIM for devices and services. In Canada, Virgin is CDMA and runs off the Bell infrastructure - so if you get decent Bell coverage in your area, service will be about the same quality.

The thing that all the fanboys on HoFo seem to be noticing is the attractive female used in the promotional video. I believe one poster later in the thread described the model as ‘hott’, which leads me to believe he drooled on his keyboard during the video and it now duplicates keystrokes.

The primary focus of the thread and the Crackberry article (the hawt girl, in case you haven’t followed) is followed closely by an interestingly decent offer. A three year contract gets you a $0 device and a 8GB microSD card; plans start at $25 for voice and $30 for unlimited email/Web/IM, with explicit support for Windows Live Messenger and Facebook integration. Virgin also doesn’t charge for system access fees or incoming text messages at present, so consider that a $6.95 discount per month.

(There are also several other data packages available, including the traditional $15 unlimited email/BlackBerry Messenger plan. Another interesting plan seems to be the $45 email, web, text messaging, IM, voicemail and call display addon for the people who can’t get enough SMS action.)

What’s even more interesting about this $30 plan? BES access appears to be is enabled. That’s right; the BlackBerry informational page notes that unlimited access to enterprise email is included:

Enterprise email
Our BlackBerry plans give you unlimited access to enterprise email if you:

• Use the BlackBerry® Enterprise Server in your organization
• Have a client access license

You get:

• Secure access to corporate email
• Corporate data access
• Wireless email and calendar synchronization
• Remote address lookup

I’ve written into the Virgin support team to confirm that BES is activated on their standard packages. I’ve also asked if the $15 plan includes BES support as well, and will update this post with my findings the answer is yes, as confirmed by Chris below.

If Since BES support is present, this would makes Virgin’s offering the only unlimited package in Canada with enterprise support. While this news isn’t quite the shakeup of a new wireless entrant, Virgin now would be my top pick for a CDMA provider over Telus or Bell.

Edit: Cleaned up some grammar.
Edit 2: Updated with confirmation of BES inclusion.

ev98.net and jakebillo.com have moved to a new, local hosting provider. Among the advantages of increased reliability and speed, we also now can directly call or email the people responsible for managing the server if there are any issues. Dave has also moved his personal site and you should all roundly harass him to write something.

Most large, hosted files will now be kept on files.ev98.net, which still uses Dreamhost since response time isn’t too critical, and disk space is more plentiful in that direction.

Please let me know if you see any oddities in the feed or in posts from this point forward.

As per Engadget, there was no way Rogers would ever release unlimited data for the iPhone. The base plan starts at $60 per month, only has 150 minutes (plus unlimited evenings and weekends) and has a 400MB data cap.

Apologies about my previously optimistic post on the subject, but the lesson here is “listen to financial reports and not random dealers posting online.”

The more interesting plan is a $20 addon mentioned, which includes:

Caller ID, Who Called, Caller Ring Trax, 10,000 Sent Text Messages and 6:00 p.m. Early Evening Calling and 2,500 Call Forwarding Minutes.

This will mark the first time Rogers will publicly make a massive text message plan available. Prior to this, all plans were capped at 2500 sent messages unless you weaseled Retentions into the unadvertised “unlimited” package.

As per CNet’s news.com post, Slide Inc, purveyor of useless Facebook fluff applications, has had a security breach and the “Top Friends” application has had its API key and listing pulled from the site. With one fell swoop, the MySpacization of Scary Stalkerbook was paused.

This is just a reminder that the developers of any Facebook application have full access to your profile. Privacy controls do not apply and any information that an app pulls is supposed to only be used for caching and removed within 24 hours. This was obviously not the case with Top Friends. By the way, if you have to provide additional profile information for a third-party application, they own that data and can use it in any way they see fit.

Of course, anyone reading this site will probably be well-informed about how applications work anyway - so you can instead gloat in glee at the fact that an overvalued startup with no useful product got slammed with the banhammer.

This is something I’ve been wanting for a while now - the Xbox Live DRM utility now functions properly. As some background information, when you download video or games from Xbox Live Marketplace, the content is licensed to two places: your Gamertag online, and your console by its serial number. If you change consoles, you can only access content if you’re signed into Xbox Live under that original profile.

For me, this was a major problem because I’m now on my fourth Xbox 360 - two exchanged through EB’s warranty program for faulty disc drives, plus a functional unit that I sold so I could upgrade to an Elite with 120GB hard drive and HDMI. As a result, some of my Rock Band tracks were licensed to the previous console and some to the new one. Offline play at a friend’s place was severely hampered and the game always required my acount to be signed in to access the content. No longer, though!

Check out Major Nelson’s post on the process, or hit up the license migration page. All my content was relinked to my 360 Elite properly and there should be some good times with Rock Band in the near future.

Peter Westwood, a WordPress developer, recently announced a planned change that will disable Atom and XML-RPC publishing by default. I’m thrilled at this direction: many of my corporate and professional installations of WordPress require significant tweaking to disable remote publishing.

In the meantime, I’ve actually had no ill effects from removing xmlrpc.php from the default WordPress installation.

Another tweak I usually employ is applying a .htaccess file to the wp-admin directory. Using a set of Allow/Deny directives, you can restrict access to your administration panel to local machines only. For example, creating a new file /wp-admin/.htaccess:

Order allow,deny
Allow from 192.168.1
Deny from all

This example file ensures that only users coming from 192.168.1.x addresses can access the administration dashboard. It’s very useful because regardless of password compromise, only internal users will ever be able to access the login prompt.

Another solution that would still allow remote access by trusted users would include a dual-layered authentication system. Using the htpasswd utility and the .htaccess tutorial from Apache, create a separate login to access the administration panel. This prompt will appear before the default WordPress login. Roaming web spiders and malicious bots will have a more difficult time accessing the wp-admin directory with appropriate access restrictions in place.

I’ve been holding off on posting this because too many data rumors are lame, but BlackBerry Cool and CrackBerry have just announced that Rogers is upping their consumer BlackBerry data plans.

The bad news: nothing’s unlimited, and if the iPhone plans leaked yesterday are accurate then BlackBerry users are getting severely shafted. Finally, these plans are for BIS customers only. If you’re on an Enterprise Server, your choices are still $40 for 7MB, $60 for 25MB, and $100 for 1GB.

The plans are available at Rogers’ site and calling data/BlackBerry support (1-800-ROGERS1 and say “BlackBerry” at any possible opportunity, or *611 from your device). Here’s a summary of what you can get:

All of these new plans (except for the Flex Rate) have overage protection, which means that usage of over 60MB is only counted at $0.03/MB. Business plans that offer data pooling can’t take advantage of this feature either. Here’s how this works in practice:

• You’re on the 300MB plan ($30 base) and use 500MB in that month because you decided to run BitTorrent off your device.
• You’re charged for your base plan: $30 for 300MB
• You’re then charged $0.50 per MB, up to 60MB: another $30 for 360MB
• You’re then charged $0.03 per MB, for data after 60MB: another $4.20 for 500MB
• Total data bill is $30+$30+$4.20 = $64.20

The good news: the base 300MB is a significant amount on a BlackBerry device - I’ve never gotten close to this figure myself, and in fact had a hard time topping 60MB/month on my Telus package. The included data can also be used for tethering to a laptop, and people likely to tether are paying more appropriate rates for heavier usage.

Rogers’ site also indicates that these plans are available on monthly agreements, meaning that you shouldn’t have to sign a data contract to take advantage of these new offerings. Of course, if you’re using a hardware upgrade credit or buying a new device directly from Rogers, you may get locked into a data package for three years. My personal preference these days would be to get an unlocked device online and activate it with an existing contract, unless you need UMA support (Rogers Home Calling Zone.)

Since the iPhone plans are still just a rumor, I’m happy with a solid release of much more customer-friendly wireless data packages, and will try to get some of my clients and associates moved to these offerings.

Engadget Mobile is reporting a HowardForums post that details two potential iPhone plans for Canadian users: on top of a qualifying voice plan, unlimited data will be offered at $30 per month for individual customers and $45 for business clients. There’s also a Facebook group detailing the information.

In contrast to my previous statements on the subject, this seems like a reasonable plan falling in line with what AT&T is offering in the States. It remains to be seen if this rumor is accurate, but the original poster is generally well-informed and a community member in reasonably high standing. One other known employee/dealer has also confirmed the memo. That said - most of the usual dealers and “insider sources” have been silent on this matter.

I’m assuming the qualifying voice plan will be $35 minimum plus system access fee: Rogers has stated they’re expecting $90 per user with a combination of the voice and data plans, and $30 data plus $35 voice plus $6.95 SAF is only about $72. If they assume most people will take value packages, such as the $15 smartphone plan (text messaging/caller ID/voicemail), this figure is slightly closer to what’s expected financially.

While Apple may have given up their revenue-sharing program in favour of carrier subsidized phones, if this memo is accurate then Apple still retains a large amount of control over the available plans. It’s nearly a direct copy of AT&T’s launch memo with a few minor changes. 

The plan is listed as “unlimited data (E-mail/Web)” which people are presently freaking out over for no good reason. This terminology is actually very common in the BlackBerry world, meaning that you get email access as well as having standard Internet access available - which encompasses all on-device TCP/IP data.

Forum users are assuming that GPS/YouTube/other random features will be disabled because they’re not specifically listed in the plan title. If we assume Apple still mains some control over the sales and pricing process, one thing certainly enforced is full access to all applications on the device.

One thing that’s probably accurate is the inability to tether with this plan. It’s not technically possible out of the box, requiring a hacked device. Users on HowardForums that desire tethering capabilities seem to be the most likely to abuse the definition of “unlimited” in wireless carrier terms: when you’re downloading over 5GB per month on your device, there’s a high chance you’re using the plan as an Internet connection replacement.

Is $30 per month unlimited data enough to get you to change carriers and pick up an iPhone? Myself, I’m waiting for the BlackBerry Bold (9000) and its related plans.

For $7 per month, it should.

As per this thread on HowardForums and the fact that I got a call from Purolator that displayed the business name. Didn’t think anything of it since nearly 100% of my calls are already listed as contacts in the address book.

Changes are, for once, reflected on Rogers’ site.

It’s interesting that they’d give up this formerly $2 per month cash cow. I’d had this feature for a month as a trial, but I assume the uptake outside of these one-off promotions must have been pretty lame.

Here’s where most people might make an unfounded assumption that this must be for the iPhone 3G, oh my dear sweet Christ. I will do no such thing and instead make an unfounded assumption that it’s because… oh, I don’t know, somebody hacked the Gibson and irrevocably set a bitflag for all GSM towers that can’t be reversed without starting an international thermonuclear war.