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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.

His Holiness Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 3G today, and it’s finally official: the sparkling device will be available for Canadians to purchase from Rogers or Fido on July 11th. In this post, I’ll prepare you for the possible scenarios when the Christ Phone becomes available to mere mortals - and then discuss their likeliness.

Note: These are my best guesses from the unofficial information online at HowardForums, the Apple press releases, and general observations about the wireless industry. These points are subject to change before release: if they do, I’ll update the post with details. When I say “Rogers” in this writeup, I mean both Fido and the parent company.

The iPhone 3G will cost $199 in the US, but be ludicrously overpriced in Canada.

A false assumption, but not entirely unreasonable considering how device pricing in Canada has typically worked. Apple has set prices globally for the 8GB model to be at most $199 - not with a minimum advertised price, but with carrier advertising and promotional agreements that have the same effect. Expect to pay $199 CDN for the 8GB model and $299 CDN for the 16GB, keeping in line with Apple’s announcement.

You’ll have to sign a new three year contract (or renew for three years) with Rogers or Fido to get an iPhone 3G.

Correct and accurate. The iPhone 3G will only be sold in Canada under a contract, at Rogers or Fido dealers and not at Apple stores. If you’re a new customer, it won’t be a two year commitment as AT&T demands in the United States or 18 months as per O2 in the UK. Rogers’ three year standard is the only way you’ll get the device - and expect that you’ll have to keep both your voice and data plan during this time.

Existing customers will likely have to pay a $35 (re)activation fee to switch to Steve’s pride and joy, but will end their current contract without an ECF penalty. In other words, if you’re a year and a half into your contract and decide to grab the iPhone, you won’t be stuck for four and a half years - just three. This is probably the only reasonably consumer-friendly element of the device launch. It comes with a benefit for the carrier, though.

After all, while Rogers may lose money initially on letting you out early from your existing subsidized phone - you know, the one that wasn’t brewed in Cupertino - they have two things going for them:

1. They don’t have to pay Apple for each subscriber anymore - like AT&T did for the first year of the device - so all the monthly fees are going directly to the carrier. Average revenue per user is now up by, say, $10 to $18 per month for anyone on an iPhone plan automatically.
2. Your bills are going to be higher, since you’ll need a fancy data and SMS package custom-tailored for the device. Don’t expect pricing to be anywhere near the stock Mega Time 25 plan. Average revenue per user on an iPhone voice and data package will have at least doubled, if not tripled or quadrupled from $25 plus System Access Fee. When this happens, it halves or thirds the time it takes for Rogers to recoup their losses on the previous handset.

   Average revenue per user for Canadian carriers in 2007 was $56 - but under 10% of that was on data services. iPhone users will be seen as “above average” (read: suckers and chumps) to both investors and executives; so ARPU will also follow this trend.

Also? It wouldn’t be too out of place to see an increased Early Cancellation Fee for people trying to escape their iPhone contracts. At minimum, expect $400 plus a $100 data ECF for a total of $500. The sky’s the limit for the maximum, but my best guess would be an increase of $200 (specialty product) for a total of $700.

I already have an iPhone and it won’t work on Rogers after July 11th.

Any existing iPhone you may have unlocked and working on Rogers already won’t cease to work, but there’s a high chance you won’t be able to take advantage of any new iPhone-specific data plans. Rogers has lately restricted data packages to specific phones - and not just models, but specific Rogers-branded and sold devices. They accomplish this by checking the IMEI number of the device, and falling back to $0.05/KB standard data rates if you don’t have a phone with an IMEI in a certain whitelist. Good luck getting on that!

(This has recently been a major problem with unlocked BlackBerry devices, and specific data packages. For example, trying to add the $15 “unlimited personal email” package or the $15 Smartphone Value Pack to an unlocked Curve 8320 is now a difficult task. Since the IMEI isn’t in Rogers’ database, the customer service representative doesn’t see what kind of device it is and can’t provision the correct plan. The correct response is to tell them to use the generic 111111111111119 IMEI and then the packages appear.)

If you manage to pick an iPhone 3G up on eBay or outside of the country, and it’s not branded to Rogers - I wish you well when activating, but you’ll run into the same “not our product; not our problem” attitude. You also won’t be able to sell the device to a foreign user easily: Rogers refuses to provide unlock codes to users, so the best solution might be a software exploit that Apple can revoke at any time.

The iPhone won’t be the beginning of truly unlimited data in Canada.

Definitely possible and should be expected. After all, in Irish markets, O2 Ireland caps data usage for the iPhone at 1GB per month. Australian customers get a slightly more lenient 3GB allowance.

In Canada, 1GB of data usage is readily available - for $100 per month on Rogers’ existing BlackBerry plans. With Sprint now capping their mobile broadband Internet at 5GB/month and still advertising it as unlimited, expect that a lot more data in quantity will become available - but not “all you can eat.”

Consider that Apple’s involvement after the phone sale is drastically less than with the first generation device, leaving the carriers significantly more room to do evil things to consumers.

I’ll have to pay a lot of money per month for the iPhone 3G, making the $199 pricetag pretty much a drop in the bucket.

No pricing details have been acknowledged or leaked yet, but we do have the comparisons available for the UK: for 30 pounds ($60.53 CDN as of posting time) per month, the 8GB iPhone will cost about the same as it will in Canada, with 75 minutes/125 text messages and “unlimited” data.

A more prudent analysis would involve O2 Ireland’s pricing schema for the existing device. The “paddy tax”-ing company charges about 35 pounds (~$71 CDN) for 175 minutes, 100 text messages and 1GB of data.

Best guess from my end of the court would be a combined voice and data $90+SAF plan with a 1GB cap.

What’s the bottom line?

Without Apple’s direct intervention, don’t expect too much of a change in Rogers’ status quo, and prepare to pull your pants down for three years if you absolutely must have the shiny trinket.

I’m still waiting to hear how the spectrum auction’s going.

From HowardForums: Bell is launching two new personal data plans similar to Telus’ Email and Web 30.

• Unlimited Personal Email & Internet BlackBerry 30
• Unlimited Personal Email & Internet Windows Mobile 30

On the BlackBerry, this package offers unlimited data since all traffic flows through the BIS browsing transport - the only thing restricted is tethering the device to a computer for Internet access, which is charged at $15/MB. US roaming is $8/MB, both figures which seem to fall in with the ridiculous state of Canadian wireless data charges.

While I personally don’t use Bell for wireless - and would definitely go with Telus over Bell if choosing between CDMA carriers - the company has a large number of BlackBerry devices provisioned. It’s a competitive move before the Rogers iPhone and BlackBerry Bold launch, and if you don’t need BES access, this might be a worthwhile plan to investigate.

As the informal network weasel in my new place, I get the wonderful joy of troubleshooting malfunctioning appliances and making sure that the router eats as few Xbox Live sessions as possible. Since I’m just lazy enough not to want to set up a Linux routing box, the current approach for networking is two connections into two routers:

• Rogers Hi-Speed Internet Extreme (95GB cap), into a Linksys WRT54GL running Tomato 1.19 firmware and
• TekSavvy, unlimited cap, DSL dry loop, into yet another Linksys WRT54GL running Tomato 1.19

The main server with two network cards accesses the Internet over the TekSavvy line, using a combination of manual interface metric settings and a MAC address block at the Rogers router.

It’s not the TekSavvy line that’s been giving problems, though - and the Rogers connection is solid, even with four computer science types all wanting their pornography and HD movies updated Java Development Kits seven times a week. It’s the Rogers DNS servers that cause problems looking up domains - I’ll often receive 60 to 120 second timeouts just seeking a match for facebook.com. Boo, you fail!

The solution is to switch DNS services to OpenDNS at the router level. Tomato provides an excellent internal DNS cache service, which still allows Linux systems to access internal hostnames - and OpenDNS returns lookups reliably and without fail. The price you pay for this is a page of sponsored search results on a domain typo or non-existing hostname, but this is fairly similar to how most browsers function anyway.

To activate OpenDNS in Tomato firmware, you can change the “Static DNS” settings in your router administration panel. On default configurations, the address is 192.168.1.1 with username root, password admin. Then it’s just a matter of adding the server entries 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220:

There you have it - DNS that still resolves local systems, but is significantly more reliable than the ISP-provided service.

So were any of you looking forward to the Rogers BlackBerry and PDA data plan changes? A recent update to that thread noted that the changed rates have been delayed indefinitely. For now, the best choice for data usage is the Telus PDA offer, which is now $30 per month for unlimited data (but not text messaging.)

The upcoming Q2 2008 service changes should make bundling voicemail and caller ID slightly more worthwhile - for $11 per month, you get:

Caller ID
Enhanced Voicemail
Name Display
Who Called
Mobile Backup
125 Text Messages

Considering caller ID and name display are about $9 per month by themselves, this will probably be the extra “standard package” to consider for light text messaging users. There are a few other Communicate Packs listed in the thread. Expect these packages to go live around May 6th.

Oh, and you can now get 1GB of BlackBerry data for $100 per month. Awesome!

…NOT.

The wonderful folks over at HowardForums have posted a definitive FAQ for how long distance is charged for any cell phone on the Rogers network. Firstly, your phone is tied to a “home calling area”. From the “simplified” post:

Inside your home calling area, receiving any calls (from a local or long distance number) uses airtime minutes only. Making a local call only uses airtime, and placing a long-distance call costs an additional 30 cents per minute.

Outside your home calling area, receiving any calls (from a local or long distance number) will use airtime and cost 30 cents per minute. Making calls within the area - that is: using a Waterloo phone in Toronto to call a Toronto number - only uses airtime. Making calls outside the area (Waterloo phone, in Toronto, calling a Waterloo number) uses airtime plus the additional 30 cent charge.

Sufficiently confused? Click to enlarge a crafty diagram - I know a few people have a good time with these. Keep in mind you’ve always using airtime.

Of course, if you have a long distance plan, this really doesn’t apply to you.

It’s happened, and people should start getting upset. Rogers has begun injecting packets to indicate that people have reached their “usage allowance” into arbitrary websites - which curiously does not include Google, likely due to the previous public outcry when test images appeared on Ars Technica.

The top frame on nearly every website obscures text and causes web pages to load extremely slowly. In my testing, the content loaded from 64.71.251.10 and often required websites to be reloaded before they would display properly. Unlike preview screen captures of this technology, there is no way to select “don’t display this message again”.

For interested individuals, the “acknowledge” address is http://64.71.251.10/isnsack.pl, which uses a JavaScript function to submit a CGI request.

Rogers users last week were delivered letters indicating the provider’s intent to start implementing usage caps of 60GB and 95GB for the two standard tiers, Express and Extreme. Their misinformation site contains some interesting usage calculations, but essentially muddies the waters by describing activities in an “or” context: for example, you could download 24 high-definition videos (at about 4GB each) OR download 24,300 songs.

I’m admittedly surprised at their references to BitTorrent and high-definition movie downloads, but frankly that’s what their target audience is with this particular site: heavy users that they hope to coerce into keeping under a specific 95GB point.

The problem for consumers with this approach is that it’s no longer just the top 10% of users being targetted - a 95GB cap means that the top 10% of users will be using close to that amount, and it would be trivial for the ISP to reduce the figure in the future, even as more bandwidth intensive applications emerge.

Good news, though: extra bandwidth usage charges top out at $25 extra per month, which is a fee I’ll likely be paying part of every month upon my next move. (I also have full intent to purchase a TekSavvy unlimited account as well.)

From a network management perspective, I understand the need to keep subscribers and abusers of the service under control. There have always been provisions in every Internet contract for disconnecting people based on overuse, even back when dialup connections were standard. I’m irked that something previously touted as “unlimited” has gotten to the point where a hard cap and extra charges are necessary. Having heavy users on your network comes with the territory of having users like Granny checking her email once a week.

Rogers injects a usage frame into a webpage.

Admittedly, my Internet usage patterns tend to encompass newsgroup downloading and hefty SCP/SFTP transfers - on a regular basis working for IBM, I’d have to prop the latest Eclipse builds from Ottawa down the home line. Combined with the rest of the mandatory software suite, the nightly package could be 5GB.

One thing that will be interesting to see is Rogers’ deep packet inspection and rewriting - the usage message that caused issue back in December. They have an example image shown on one of their magazine property websites.

As soon as they start to insert HTML arbitrarily into webpages, that’s where they’ve crossed the line.

Are you going to change your internet usage patterns as a result of these developments? How much bandwidth are you using on a monthly basis?

From Boy Genius Report:

Deutsche Telekom has been pre-approved for a financing and protocol agreement which will allow them to introduce T-Mobile to the Canadian market (subject to restrictions in all provinces except Ontario during a 6, 12 and 18 month trial period that expires in 2010), and also pre-approves them for testing roaming, cell tower reception and international data agreements.

More details from the source, but the information seems credible - and after all, isn’t another wireless player in Canada what we’d like?

The most common complaint I hear about T-Mobile in the States is their lack of coverage compared to AT&T or Verizon, but realistically, another GSM carrier would really only give people options. The ability to roam on Rogers towers for brief periods of time - especially if government mandated cooperation occurred - could also improve the coverage situation drastically.