Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

UW’s CampusTechShop outlet has become an authorized Rogers Wireless dealer, and lately they’ve been trumpeting the $25 and $45 student packages. Every carrier in Canada has similar student deals to try and bump new subscribers and ARPU in the fourth quarter.

What I don’t understand is how such an outlet expects to attract new signups through this ridiculous device pricing. (Yes, these prices are on three year contracts.) I’m assuming this is what they’re charging without a data plan… that’s really the only way I think Rogers could justify selling a Pearl for $300.

• Blackberry Pearl 8120 - $299.99
• Blackberry Curve Red - $399.99
• Blackberry Bold - $599.99

Yeah… no thanks. If this is their idea of a special promotional price worthy of an email blast, forget it.

While it may seem like all I write about these days is Rogers, it’s really the only thing I’ve been dealing with on the service provider front. All my other corporate relations have been going well: I pay people money and they provide a service without bothering me unduly. (I must congratulate the wireless business for their 6GB data plan extension and forthcoming reasonably priced data packages, although one could make the case that Telus and Bell really forced them into it.) This time, it’s about the Internet side of the equation.

Beginning July 18th, Rogers began implementing a provider-wide SiteFinder-style service, where users are redirected to a “search” page with sponsored results for mistyped and nonexistent domains. On a technical level, I fundamentally disagree with this change: it breaks the concept of NXDOMAIN (a useful “domain does not exist” response) and makes things much more difficult to troubleshoot with respect to network architecture. The only reason I haven’t bitched and whined about this much earlier is that I’ve been using OpenDNS for completely unrelated reasons. It was only when my roommate Alex complained about VPN connectivity that I actually looked into the issue.

It turns out that Rogers’ marketing effort completely bricks internal domain resolution for a lot of common VPN clients, including the default Windows XP offering. So if your company, like many others, has internal domains such as corpweb.example.com, Rogers’ search will open up with the terms “corpweb example” at the minimum. This practice has data exposure implications: not only does Rogers now know about an internal domain you’re trying to access, but a third party provider like Yahoo now knows.

If you were an employee of a competing search engine and trying to VPN from home, Yahoo would now know something about your internal network structure; this is bad news all around. Hitting a favourite or quick launch link to corpweb.example.com/livelink/llsapi.exe?doc=Network_Security_Breach_Sept0408.doc would reveal the choice of LiveLink as a corporate CMS, a dependence on Microsoft Word and a document detailing a potentially classified incident.

OpenDNS isn’t any better by default, either. They redirect search results and mistyped domains, and in the process intercept VPN traffic. To get around this, you have to create an account and blacklist corporate VPN connections from “helpful results” on a per-domain basis. The solution also involves downloading and maintaining a dynamic IP address update client, or setting a Tomato-enabled router to perform the same task.

What I’ve done for now is listened to the accurate advice on trevoro.ca and changed my primary Rogers DNS server to an unadvertised IP address: altdns.rnc.net.cable.rogers.com, or 64.71.255.202. This server seems reasonably quick for name resolution and returns proper responses when a domain is not found, allowing VPN software to resolve internal addresses.

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.

And here’s the wrapup.

• Spring 2008 term has officially ended. For the past few days I’ve been trying to relax; as opposed to creating content for the Web, there’s been a lot of Halo 3 and other video games going on.
• I start again at RIM on September 2nd. Things haven’t changed much from when I was there last, which should make for a smooth transition.
• Hardware upgraded to a BlackBerry Bold as I’m a consumer whore with company loyalty. The screen is really sharp and the new processor gives a really responsive UI. The iPhone 3G was admittedly an attractive option but had two major buzzkills: no physical keyboard, and gimped push email. I had to trade my weaselled retentions plan in for something a bit more conventional, but I’ve now got a monthly plan encompassing some text messaging capabilities.
• Warren also purchased me an Invisible Shield for the device. I highly recommend this product. Resale value will be much higher and any new iPods will definitely get one of these.
• It’s move-in time for our neighbours, which means the landlord feels the need to test out his new bowling ball by dropping it down next door’s flight of stairs repeatedly. (In all reality, he’s probably using a hammer on something, but it sounds suspiciously like my initial description.) I’m hoping that this term, there’ll be some attractive girls in the same complex - but that’s probably a long shot.

From a HowardForums post, I’ve found out that the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic is seeking comments from people affected by Bell or Rogers’ throttling. This refers to Bell’s global limitation of about 30K/s for BitTorrent, and Rogers areas affected by Ellacoya/Sandvine boxes.

I’ve written Robert Hester an email about my own experiences on TekSavvy, which I’ll repost below. If you’ve been affected by this nonsense, it might be worth your while to write in before a decision is made in September.

Hi Robert,

I read a post from a CIPPIC alias on HowardForums (http://howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1406593) and figured I’d contribute my experiences with Bell’s internet throttling.

I’m a Computer Science student in Waterloo, Ontario, and currently subscribe to TekSavvy - a Bell DSL reseller. I chose them because I consider Bell Sympatico service to be substandard in the market: Bell’s technical support is lacking at best, they limit bandwidth usage to 60GB per month, and they don’t offer additional features such as static IP addresses.

Bell has applied throttling to their wholesale customers including TekSavvy, specifically for P2P protocols such as BitTorrent. When this network management is active - which I find tends to be more than twelve hours out of every day - my BitTorrent download speeds are limited to 30-50KB/s. This is a far cry from the 5Mbit (~500KB/s) service that I pay for.

What really disappoints me is that an independent reseller has to suffer because Bell unilaterally decides to squash competition. Unfiltered P2P and unlimited bandwidth usage are key competitive features that I’m willing to pay for. When a third party like Bell decides that they can’t compete and uses technical restrictions to bring other services down to the same level of reduced functionality, I’d go as far to say it’s an unfair trade practice. In my opinion: if this practice is not currently illegal, it should be.

I have no objection to reasonable network management, but reducing download speeds to 10% of their potential based on a transmission protocol is far from reasonable.

Thanks for your time and consideration on this important issue. Please feel free to contact me at the email address or phone number below if you require anything else.

Jake Billo
jake@jakebillo.com
http://jakebillo.com/
519-279-4009

And the launch of the iPhone 3G is on in Canada, with the predictable scenario of shady dealers without the device in stock trying to boost sales commissions. This whole situation reminds me of the Xbox 360 launch, where Best Buy and some other retailers tried to bundle consoles with accessories and extended warranty plans.

In any event, the big news is that Rogers is launching a promotional data plan - $30 per month, 6GB of data including tethering, requiring a three year data contract. The early termination fee is $100. The plan is supposed to be a way to quiet down the people over at Ruined iPhone and stop the persistent rumors that Apple is shafting Rogers for device shipments.

Unfortunately, the promotion is only until August 31st, at which time we can expect to see data pricing return to Rogers’ usual standards. It’s better than no such plan at all, and I’d suggest early adopters get in on this one like they did with Telus’ $15/unlimited plan back last December.

On a positive note, people in the HowardForums thread are reporting that representatives are indeed adding the promotional plan to “gray-market” devices and BlackBerry devices. (”Gray market” apparently means non-Rogers branded, unlocked phones: I vote that we quit using the term because it implies these phones are illegal, when they’re merely .)

I’ll look into this plan when the Bold launches, but in the meantime I have an 8320 that won’t receive service books to fix. Going back to the 8700 seems slightly primitive.

Update: If you’re interested in dealing with a Rogers CSR and they’re not sure what data package you’re referring to, the code for this plan on a BlackBerry is BB6GBIS3.

Update 2: Here’s the official Rogers page for the plan.

If you’re lucky enough to have a BlackBerry device running OS 4.5, BlackBerry Internet Service is now enabled for Rogers and should also be ready for most - if not all other North American carriers.

4.5 OSes are officially available for most recent GSM/EDGE devices. I’d recommend staying away from beta releases, as they contain debugging utilities and aren’t as stable as carrier-certified versions.

To find out if your device has an official upgrade available, look at the stickied threads for your device at BlackBerry Forums. These forums include the 81xx, the 83xx and the 88xx.

If you don’t have OS 4.5, you can still add Hotmail, Windows Live and AOL accounts for push email through your carrier’s BIS site.

Here’s how to activate HTML email for devices running OS 4.5:

1. Sign into your carrier’s BIS site:

• Rogers
• Telus
• Bell
• Fido

2. From the site, click Service Books / Send Service Books.

3. When your device receives the service books, go into Messages / BlackBerry menu / Options and choose Email Settings. For each account, change “Enable HTML Email” to Yes.

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.

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.