Omega Point

Mobile data rates: Canada’s national shame

With the US release of the iPhone per­me­at­ing even Cana­dian news, I’m find­ing that my cur­rent smart­phone solu­tion just isn’t as desir­able as that which I can­not buy. These days, I’m more than happy with my Treo 650, despite Pal­mOS show­ing its age. I expect a Linux-based Treo will fol­low the recent Palm Foleo by the end of the year. How­ever, I don’t actu­ally even use the data side of my smartphone.

That’s right, I have a smart­phone with no web access at all. Why? Well, the 650’s wifi capa­bil­i­ties kind of suck, but it’s usable. How­ever, if I want to use EDGE, I don’t have a lot of options.

Canada has three national mobile phone com­pa­nies: Bell and Telus, which are both CDMA, and Rogers, which uses GSM. (It’s actu­ally four national com­pa­nies, if you include Fido, which is now owned by Rogers, and which uses the Rogers net­work, but has sep­a­rate brand­ing and billing plans, includ­ing things like per-second billing.)

Despite hav­ing an oth­er­wise highly devel­oped telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work, there is a flaw: Canada’s cel­lu­lar com­pa­nies are goug­ing us on data fees. Observe. Sadly, at one point, Fido had a $20/month unlim­ited EDGE plan, as well as a $30/month unlim­ited incoming/outgoing calls plan. Need­less to say, after their acqui­si­tion by Rogers, both of these were qui­etly canceled.

So right now, my want-to-buy device seems to be the Nokia N800 tablet. It’s a tiny 800x480, WiFi/Bluetooth web brows­ing, media-playing, handwriting-recognizing, 8GB-extensible Linux device. There’s no phone, but then again, I already have a phone.

So, who wants to buy me one?