The new Rogers/Fido iPhone 3G Rate Plans

[narc]

Rogers told us something big was coming on July 11.
Something bigger is coming every month to your monthly bill for the next three years.

Rogers is the only cell carrier in the world that requires a 3-year contract for the iPhone.

They do not offer an unlimited data option, opening the door to large over-limit fees.

Rogers levies an extra charge for Call Display.

You've all heard about it, some of you might get one, some of you won't give a shit.

The lowest $60 iPhone 3G Rate Plans:

• Visual Voicemail is included
• 150 Weekday Minutes with Unlimited Evenings & Weekends from 9pm - 7am (additional weekday minutes $0.35)
• 400MB a month (additional data is 50mb for the first 60mb's & $0.03 cents after)
• 75 Text Messages (additional Sent Text Messages are $0.15)
• Unlimited Access to Rogers/Fido Wireless Hot Spots
• $6.95 System Access Fee
• $0.50 Monthly 911 Emergency Access Fee
• as a BONUS THE ROGERS PLAN gives you 3 Months of Unlimited Local Calling
• One-Time $35 Activation Fee

For more updated info click below for the direct links:
Rogers Apple 3G iPhone Rate Plans
Fido Apple 3G iPhone Rate Plans

Its secondary purpose is to educate would-be buyers into seriously considering what they are signing up for with Rogers current data plans.

According to Rogers, a 400MB data plan with 150 minutes and 9PM evenings is a "HIGH-Value plan." What I'll attempt to outline below is how unrealistic the data portion of the Rogers plans really are. What you'll find below is a list of Rogers highly exaggerated usage statements, followed by a few things left out of their documentation.

What Will 400MB of data allow a customer to do? The first thing one might note, (after the exaggerated number which I'll dissect momentarily) is their entire usage statement is one big "OR" statement. While I know many people who were ecstatic over the prospect of getting an iPhone, none struck me as interested in only e-mail "OR" Pictures. So right from the start, the information Rogers provided the general public is misleading and self serving. Lets dig a little deeper into the realities of data consumption.


E-mail

I did a quick tally of my g-mail account which is currently sitting at 274MB used. Contained within is a mix of 6,570 emails of which approximately 65% are text and 35% are html. The average size of a text e-mail is 40 kilobytes. HTML e-mails, especially from retailers often exceeded 1 Megabyte in size by the time all images and CSS are loaded. But for the sake of argument, lets cut that in half and say the average HTML e-mail is only 500 Kilobytes in size.

On average I receive 400 e-mail per month on my primary personal account. I won't pretend to say I've spoken to a large audience to see how similar my results are, but I did speak to a few friends, and they were all around the same. Even my wife who rarely uses a computer outside work receives an average of 200 e-mails per month and she's not someone who would be interested in an iPhone and as such isn't even your target consumer. So here's the math:

(140 HTML e-mail * 500KB) + ( 260 TEXT e-mail * 40KB) = (70MB + 10.4MB)
= 80MB per month in e-mail

TOTAL: 80MB per month

So 400 e-mail messages was just over 80MB per month. Even with just text e-mails, its an average of 10,000 e-mails per month, which is a mere fraction of Rogers outlandish statement of 200,000 e-mails. Just before we move on, I'd like to point out this calculation excludes e-mail I've sent.


Web Pages

According to Ms. Elizabeth Hamilton, the average webpage size is 130KB in size. The link provided to that research actually leads to a more comprehensive and recent report. In the second report it states the average web pages is now 310.4KB, and is expected to exceed 385KB by the end of 2008. Given a median number of approximately 350KB, that equates to 1,143 pages per month. This number is not a significant reach for the average user as my example below shows a conservative average of 900 page views a month.

The problem with both these reports is that they are an average of all sites. The sites most people are going to visit most often can be found on the Alexa Top 500 websites. As an example I pulled up my Facebook profile, which is pretty baron, and when I added up the size of all 120 items on the page, the total was 994.7KB. This does not include the traffic required to do DNS lookups on the various IP's data is being pulled from, nor the requests back and forth to the web server requesting each of the 120 items. Next I pulled up my nieces page who is big into Facebook. Her page included a whopping 757 items. I wasn't about to count the total size of all those, but to make my point just the profile.php file for her page was 1.8Mb.

My point is that many of the pages users will frequently visit are not low bandwidth pages, but sites like Facebook which are no where remotely close to 120KB. I believe I've made my point that web pages are not 120KB in size, but for my example, lets use a relatively moderate page size of 350KB. On average I visit 10 to 15 websites daily, 4 of which I visit multiple times throughout the day, such as the popular social news site DIGG. I don't have an exact number, but if I had to guess, I'd say between all sites, I view an average of 200 pages each day. Now obviously I would not be doing all of this on my iPhone, as I do not currently today on my iPod. If I had to put a number to it I'd say I do around 20% of my surfing on my iPod touch at least 5 days a week. I also think its reasonable to assume you would use your iPhone more, as the big limitation to the iPod is being somewhere there is WiFi access. Given all this information lets say I surf an average of 30 pages per day over the course of the average month:

350KB average page size * 30 pages * 30 days = 315MB per month

Again, this is a far cry from the exaggerated claim of 31,000 pages per month. Based on my usage thats closer to 1,000 page views per month.

TOTAL: 395MB per month


Photo Attachments

1,360 photo attachments would indicate the average photo size was only 294KB. I don't know about your camera, but most are 5-10 Mega pixels these days, and have file sizes ranging from just over 1MB up to and in excess of 8MB. The iPhones built in 2 mega pixel camera, will have a file size relatively close the the 294KB Rogers claims, but I think it rather dubious to assume all images will be coming directly from the iPhone camera. Why, might you ask? My question to Rogers is where are these photo attachments going to or coming from? The iPhone does not currently support Multimedia Messaging service. So what does Rogers mean here? Are they talking about sending pictures taken on the iPhone via e-mail? Are they copied onto your iPhone from your iPhoto/Aperture library via iTunes? If so, even photos of 1MB in size, which is around a 3 megapixel image would very quickly use up that 400MB per month.

For the sake of argument, lets view or upload 40 photos per month to/from our Mobile Me website at 294KB per image.

40 photos * 284KB = 12MB per month

TOTAL: 407MB per month


The You-Tube factor

Rogers failed to even mention the fact that Youtube is part of the iPhone product nor did they speak to how many videos a person could watch per month. The a conservative estimate for the average size of a you-tube video being 2MB to 5MB in size per minute, that will add up very quickly. So for the sake of this example, lets say we watch 10 five minute videos per month at an average bit rate of 3MB per minute.

(10 movies * 5 minutes each * 3 MB per minute) = 150MB per month

TOTAL: 557MB per month



iTunes Application Store

Here's where we start getting into the real unknowns. How much data would the average person use per month from the iTunes store? Lets guess and say 20MB in a month.

TOTAL: 577MB per month


Mobile Me

One of the huge benefits of the iPhone is the add-on services available such as MobileMe. The push technology employed willl undoubtedly reduce the amount of data coming to and from the phone for e-mail, but it also creates new data for things like the Calendar and Contacts. While we don't know how much this will equate to, I can make an educated guess based on the current g-mail sync utility on my blackberry, which clocks in at about 8-12MB per month.

TOTAL: 589MB per month


Third Party Applications

Without a doubt thousands of third party applications will be made available for the iPhone now that the iPhone SDK is out. The model for this program is superb and will be nothing less than a great success. Lets just take a single application we know will be released for the iPhone. Spore, a solo + online game. More traditional online games back in the days of bandwidth starved dial-up, required at minimum, a 28.8Kbps modem, which equates to 3.6KB per second data rate or 216KB per minute. Even if the game transmitted one half that amount of data per minute, thats still a whopping 6.89MB per hour of game play. Lets consider 3 such activities at 4 hours usage per month each. That equates to another 84MB total.

TOTAL: 673MB per month

Google Maps

While I don't think people will be using Google Maps as much as e-mail and web browsing, it is certainly something that is integrated into the iPhone, and has some very powerful and compelling uses. While I don't know what the actual data usage on an iPhone with Google Maps is, I do know that each time you load a map section on a Blackberry its 195KB to 205KB of data. If I goto Satellite view it balloons to 500KB to 700KB per screen load. Where does one even begin to guess how much data Google Maps could chew up a month... Simply using this once or twice a month could easily chew up 50MB of data. Luckily my data package on my BlackBerry is unlimited so I DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT IT. I don't think its unreasonable to think, with all the integration to address book, etc, that this feature won't be used at least 4 or 5 times a month. This would easily set you back another 100MB, just through minimal use of bandwidth intensive application.

TOTAL: 773MB per month


WiFi Hot Spots

Rogers claims that to help conserve data usage over 3G, an iPhone customer has free access to ALL Rogers Wi-Fi hot spots.. Well I hate to burst bubbles, but there is ONE Rogers wi-fi hot spot in the entire city in which I reside. Now i realize bigger centers have better access than that, but that is also defeating in purpose. Had I wanted to use wi-fi hot spots, I'd just keep using my iPod Touch.


Conclusion

As you can see we are already at 773MB data usage per month using very conservative numbers. Myself and many others believe data use will be significantly higher than illustrated here. The fact is, people do not want to worry about how many YouTube videos they watch or whether they dare use Google Maps.

Rogers, I'm one of many potential customers you are missing out on because your plans are unreasonable. Most of us are not so much arguing the price per month at that $60-$90 dollar price point, but rather the value received for the amount paid. You have strong competition in Canada, and don't kid yourself as your GSM monopoly won't last past 2012. All the CDMA providers in Canada are slowly making the transition over to GSM whether they've officially announced it or not. Your marketing intelligence should already be aware of this. I currently work for your competition, and was going to buy an iPhone from you. What does that say about this product? Your prices?

To Apple, myself and many others, over 33,000 in fact, strongly encourage you to put continued pressure on Rogers to make the plan suit the phone. The iPhone as you well know was not designed to be crippled by hard capped data plans. At least one other Telco; the only one with a plan worse than Rogers has heard the voice of the customer and made the change to unlimited data. Both Bell and Telus offer unlimited data plans on all smart phones. I don't expect to ever see a CDMA iPhone, but if those two and other, smaller CDMA providers in Canada can offer unlimited data, why is it Rogers refuses?

I will also be posting this on several news forums in an effort to educate and combat the highly misleading information Rogers is currently giving out to customers.

Please fix this!

Regards,

PS. This e-mail message is 316KB in size

Or if you choose not to go this route, Bell just announced an unlimited data plan for wireless connection cards at a reasonable $75 per month (plus system access fees bumping up the price to $84). The catch? The fine print includes:

You shall not use or allow others to use the Service or your Device if such use:

* consumes excessive network capacity in Bell's reasonable opinion, or causes our network, or our ability to provide services to others, to be adversely affected;
* is for multi-media streaming, voice over Internet protocol or any other application which uses excessive network capacity that is not made available to you by Bell;
* is to operate an email, web, news, chat or other service.

In other words, you pay for unlimited bandwidth, yet can't use many of the services that make affordable unlimited bandwidth such a necessity in Canada.

Newsource:
Bell to offer smartphone with unlimited data plan

Get the facts on the Rogers iPhone - HOME
CNN FORTUNE: Apple 2.0 30,000 Canadians petition for iPhone rate relief «
PC World - Canadians Blast iPhone Pricing
Reuters - Customers groan as Rogers sets iPhone prices | Technology |
Macworld | iPhone Central | Canadians protest iPhone plans

Kris Abel Blog :: Can You Avoid The iPhone Data Plans From Rogers? Yes, But It Will Cost You

[galaxie]

IMO that's fucking ridiculous. I can't belive Apple didn't force Rogers to offer unlimited data.
Nonetheless, I'm glad I'll be paying $60 per month with At&t for everything I need :)

[Leviathan]

At&t also raised their plans, the cheapest plan is $70 a month without any text messages. It is 5 dollars for 200 messages.

[Leviathan]

Have you got a SSN yet in the US? I finally got mine the other day so I'm hoping that is all I need to sign up for a phone. The other problem that I have found moving to the States is that your credit rating obviously doesn't follow you.

I have a really good credit rating in Canada and I don't even qualify for a non secured credit card here. It isn't so bad because my company has co-singed a lease for me so I'm slowly building a rating. I'm just curious if you've been able to get past any of that?

Originally Posted by galaxie

IMO that's fucking ridiculous. I can't belive Apple didn't force Rogers to offer unlimited data.
Nonetheless, I'm glad I'll be paying $60 per month with At&t for everything I need :)

[diva]

Originally Posted by Leviathan

Have you got a SSN yet in the US? I finally got mine the other day so I'm hoping that is all I need to sign up for a phone. The other problem that I have found moving to the States is that your credit rating obviously doesn't follow you.

I have a really good credit rating in Canada and I don't even qualify for a non secured credit card here. It isn't so bad because my company has co-singed a lease for me so I'm slowly building a rating. I'm just curious if you've been able to get past any of that?

If you banked with HSBC you could have your credit history transferred over to the states for a fee (I think it's $350). True story.

[inside]

Originally Posted by galaxie

IMO that's fucking ridiculous. I can't belive Apple didn't force Rogers to offer unlimited data.
Nonetheless, I'm glad I'll be paying $60 per month with At&t for everything I need :)

It's wild how cheap it is in the States.

[galaxie]

Originally Posted by Leviathan

Have you got a SSN yet in the US? I finally got mine the other day so I'm hoping that is all I need to sign up for a phone. The other problem that I have found moving to the States is that your credit rating obviously doesn't follow you.

I have a really good credit rating in Canada and I don't even qualify for a non secured credit card here. It isn't so bad because my company has co-singed a lease for me so I'm slowly building a rating. I'm just curious if you've been able to get past any of that?

I don't have my SSN yet but I do have an account with Bank of America, a US address and I'm already a US at&t customer. Once I'm registered for classes I can get my SSN and Florida DL. All I needed to sign up with at&t in the first place was my US address and photo ID.

That's really strange that you can't get a credit card bc BOA tried to convince me to get one when I signed up for my bank account and I was like "NOOOOO NO NO NO". lol. What bank have you been using?

And for me, my credit rating NOT following me is probably a good thing, heh :P

[anewlife]

Everybody who signs a cell phone contract for 3 (!) years in this fast changing world is nuts...

Sign this instead? RuinedIphone.com | Screwing Canadian iPhone customers since 2008

[Leviathan]

lol, I got an account with BoA too. So it sounds like I shouldn't have an issue getting an account with at&t. The whole credit thing hasn't really affected me much at all since I have my credit card and such from Canada. I would just like to start building a credit rating so I can cut my ties to Canada and not worry about having to pay taxes to Canada.

Originally Posted by galaxie

I don't have my SSN yet but I do have an account with Bank of America, a US address and I'm already a US at&t customer. Once I'm registered for classes I can get my SSN and Florida DL. All I needed to sign up with at&t in the first place was my US address and photo ID.

That's really strange that you can't get a credit card bc BOA tried to convince me to get one when I signed up for my bank account and I was like "NOOOOO NO NO NO". lol. What bank have you been using?

And for me, my credit rating NOT following me is probably a good thing, heh :P

[Krusha]

telus does unlimited web and email for $30/month

[ebbomega]

Originally Posted by Krusha

telus does unlimited web and email for $30/month

Telus also doesn't run on GSM so you can't use an iphone with it.

[dj_soo]

i can't stand roger's monopoly on GSM phones.

[Krusha]

yeah it's pretty redic that Rogers is the only GSM provider in Canada

[narc]

SpectrumWatch: Round 171 - Auction likely to end in next 48 hours

Posted: July 02, 2008, 1:17 PM
by David George-Cosh
Telecom, SpectrumWatch

The bidding in Industry Canada's wireless spectrum auction has slowed down with each passing day, to the point where less that 5% of all licences available for sale are being bid on today.

Only 14 licences were bid on in the most recent round compared to about 23 licences during the first round of the day. Each day has 10 rounds of bidding during the day.

No matter when the auction will end, it will certainly fulfill Industry Canada's wishes to increase competition with the 40 MHz set-aside spectrum it mandated this past November.

The federal government will also appreciate the additional $4.18-billion in revenue it will receive from the auction, almost three times as much as industry watchers predicted it would yield.

But the big winners will likely be the three incumbent wireless operators who have bid the most for spectrum during the auction. Rogers Communications Inc., Telus Corp., and BCE Inc. hold the top three spots respectively.

As it stands, Rogers holds 52 licences worth $928.9-million; Telus holds 56 licences worth $855.3-million and Bell Canada holds 54 licences worth $719.0 million. It is widely expected that Bell and Telus will use the spectrum they win to deploy a 3G HSPA/GSM network.

Among the new entrants, Quebecor Inc, Globalive Communications Corp., Shaw Communications Inc., Data & Audio-Visual Enterprises Wireless Inc. and Bragg Communications will win sizable amounts of spectrum licences.

Quebecor, Shaw and Bragg will likely operate within their home turfs of Quebec, western Canada and Atlantic Canada respectively, while Globalive will be the closest thing to a new national entrant Canadians will see. DAVE Wireless holds urban-centric spectrum across Canada as well.

SpectrumWatch: Round 171 - Auction likely to end in next 48 hours - FP Posted

[Erin]

Originally Posted by galaxie

And for me, my credit rating NOT following me is probably a good thing, heh :P

In 6 years you can come back and start all over again (but no credit is usually just as bad as having bad credit).

[cinist]

if it takes 6 years ;)

[mapleleaf4ever]

Originally Posted by narc

SpectrumWatch: Round 171 - Auction likely to end in next 48 hours

...

No matter when the auction will end, it will certainly fulfill Industry Canada's wishes to increase competition with the 40 MHz set-aside spectrum it mandated this past November.

...

Ugh, these Spectrum Auctions bug me because of how Industry players are trying to encroach more and more into the Amateur Spectrum. They've been drooling over the 144 - 148MHz and 220- 224MHz blocks for years now.

[ebbomega]

CRTC would get insane amounts of backlash from the ham community if they gave those up.

[narc]

We’ve heard through the grapevine that Apple isn’t pleased with Rogers right now, due to their insanely high iPhone data prices. This isn’t 100% confirmed at the moment, but here’s what is rumored to have happened:

* Rogers hired additional sales staff to handle the iPhone launch, all of whom have been fired effective immediately
* Apple has informed Rogers that they will be diverting a “large percentage” of their iPhone stock that was destined for Canadian shores, sending it instead to their European distributors. According to the rumor, this would leave Rogers with as few as 10-20 units per store for launch day.

The consumer backlash against Roger’s data rates was understandable, but we’re honestly a bit shocked to see Apple reacting in a similar fashion. Cupertino is doing one of two things here: they’re either attempting to strong-arm Rogers into lowering their data tariffs and making the iPhone more accessible to average consumers, or they really have simply given up and are abandoning the Canadian market in favor of a European market that seems a bit more eager to, uh, allow people to purchase an iPhone without mortgaging their Moose farm. Let’s hope, for the sake of our Canadian friends up North, that Apple is simply trying to affect some change, and that Rogers will be forced to comply by next Friday. Any more takers for the Rogers petition?

[miss.myra]

I can't believe I'd be sticking up for Roger's, but people don't understand that Canada has such a different market for cell phone users than the USA or any other part of the world does.

The whole putting down Roger's because of the requirement to sign a three year contract to get a heavy subsidy on the cost of a phone is just silly. I can't think of a single carrier that wants to release a brand new, expensive device and subsidize the cost without a contract requirement. As far as I know, consumers in places like Europe and Asia generally have less of a problem buying a piece of hardware outright and don't care about the cost. Canadian consumers have a sense of entitlement anywhere they bring their business and the bottom line for the average customer is getting a 'cheap' phone or a 'free' phone. If Roger's was giving away iphones for cheap without a contract, then their plans would need to be much more expensive to allow them to continue to operate as a business.

The smart consumers would just buy the damn phone outright and not have to worry about being locked in with their carriers once they get over the whole ihype.

[ebbomega]

It's not the requiring of a contract that's the problem. It's that every single other plan in the world doesn't require for that contract to be 3 years for the same discounts.

[miss.myra]

Originally Posted by ebbomega

It's not the requiring of a contract that's the problem. It's that every single other plan in the world doesn't require for that contract to be 3 years for the same discounts.

every single other plan? really? care to post other carrier's costs for the iphone? i'm genuinely interested.

[Erin]

Originally Posted by cinist

if it takes 6 years ;)

Statute of limitations in BC is 6 years, 2 in Alberta and 7 in Sask and Manitoba. So... Step 1 - Go to Alberta. Step 2 - Take a loan out for $30k. Step 3 - Go live somewhere cheap for a few years. Step 4 - Come home. Step 5 - Repeat...

But like I said, it's usually just as bad to have no credit.

[ebbomega]

(I picked the lowest cost if you get the highest plan, to compare to Canada's 3-year contracts)

AT&T (USA) - 2 year contract - $199
O2 (UK) - 18 month contract - Free
T-mobile (Netherlands) - 2 year contract - $2 (yes, that's not a typo)
TeliaSonera (Nordic countries) - 2 year contract - $132
Softbank (Japan) - 2-year contract - $215

[anewlife]

Over here (Switzerland) you can get an iPhone with a 1 or 2 year contract, depending on your provider. The device costs between 248 and 397 Canadian dollars (depening on price plan) if you buy into a 1 year contract...it's cheaper, obviously, if you sign a 2 years contract.

So yeah, I don't think you guys should complain, huh? :wacko: