No iPhone for Vancouver (yet) so stop asking I beg you
I answer at least ten inquires about the iPhone a day and I’m sick of it. I think the iPhone looks great, I love Apple products and I’m as anxious for it to arrive in Canada as anyone else but please for the love of Fake Steve [fsj] stop asking. So in order to aid Vancouverites lusting after an iPhone, and hopefully stop them from harrasing me about it, here is the 411 on Apple’s Lust Gadget.
1) If the iPhone comes to Canada it will be on either Rogers or Fido: the iPhone is a GSM phone and because of Apple’s deal with AT&T in the US (the only major market still using the same CDMA technology as Bell and Telus) there will not be a CDMA version for years. Thus if and when it comes it will be Rogers or Fido, though most likely Rogers since Rogers is the premier brand and owns Fido.
More after the jump? Oh I bet there is.
2) Nobody knows anything: Really. Apple is such a secretive company that nobody that you can actually speak to at Rogers or Fido will know anything more than you can find out in three minutes on Wikipedia. Seriously do you think that they’d just tell idiots like me about their secret iPhone plans when we might just go and blog about it? Anyone in Canada who knows anything real is probably under so many non-disclosure agrements they can’t even confirm their real name without checking with a lawyer. So walking into a mall and asking the first person you see in a cell store when it’s coming out is only slightly more effective than asking the person at the Starbucks.
3) Talking smack: On the subject of going into stores and asking about the iPhone, if you go into a store, no matter what company, the sales staff is going to talk down the iPhone. This will range from honest (”Oh I read some lukewarm reviews on it”) to outright crap (”Oh I heard it’s terrible and is killing off the Panda population”). The fact is even for sales staff at a store that’s likely to get the iPhone will want to sell something today not in a future tomorrow. If sales staff could simply write, “Wait for the iPhone” on their rent checks in place of money then they might not do that. So if you want to get an iPhone then wait for it, don’t go into a store and get talked into something that’s iPhone-lite.
4) Don’t worry you won’t miss it: Really there is no need to worry that somehow the iPhone will start being sold in Canada and you won’t notice. Unless you slip into a coma for the next year it’s going to be pretty hard to avoid the iPhone once it gets a firm release date in Canada. I’d expect lines outside stores in Vancouver just like in the US [fsj] , and weeks if not months of pre-release hype.
So that’s it. Tell your friends, pass it along. Apple, Rogers and Fido are not companies to shun publicity. They’re not going to secretly start selling the iPhone without you knowing it. When there’s something to announce they’ll make sure more people know about its coming than know the Prime Minister’s name.
You should link your previous post from months ago about iPhone questions/hypes. Will people ever learn and just chill over the blessed phone? I heard you get to pay more through your nose if the battery dies as you can’t just buy a new one. Your writing’s funniest when it comes from daily aggravation at work!
5) But you won’t be able to afford to use it: Even if you’ve got the money to plunk down for the device, some of the features (visual voicemail, weather, stocks, all 3rd party applications, …) require a constant connection to the internet. AT&T allows you to get unlimited internet for $20/month. This price is comparable to the rest of the world. But here in canada, Rogers “Unlimited Plan” limits you to 200MB/month and costs $100. Until Rogers starts offering competitive data rates (and the other cell companies are just as bad) the iPhone’s internet features, which are the features that set it apart from other phones, will be too expensive for the majority of Canadians to use.
This is likely a major issue for Apple. Their deal with AT&T requires all iPhone users to have unlimited data plans (which at $20/month isn’t a big deal, but at $100/month plus $5/MB over 200MB, it IS a big deal). It will be interesting to see if Rogers will finally admit to price gouging, or decide not to sell the iPhone at all. The CEO of Blackberry spoke out recently too, saying that Canada’s data is too expensive, and makes his devices (which are ironically developed in Canada) too expensive to use.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=383a1dd4-7370-4db1-971f-a66d050110cb&k=87112
Stop saying 411. Everyone else stopped at the turn of the century.
I’m not going to deny that rates in Canada could be cheaper, and I’m not going to deny that it’ll be an issue with the iPhone. However people tend to take a sort of easy view of voice and rates in Canada.
Essentially when comparing rates to the US or Europe Canada has a much smaller population and a much larger geographical area to build a network. Granted the entire nation isn’t covered (most of it isn’t), but still the geographical area covered by the three major companies is very large compared to elsewhere.
As a rough game of numbers take Canada’s population (33 million) and compare it to England’s (50 million). Infastructure costs versus potential customers are quite different in each situation. So it’s sort of a bit of slight of hand to say “Well Germans (82 million) pay this much and Americans (302 million) pay this much, and so we should pay the same.”
I’m not saying they should not or could not be lower, in fact since I’m currently working with one of the companies I won’t say anything about that, but it’s just not fair or even useful to point at pricing elsewhere.
Nobody expects a phone to work everywhere in Canada, as they would in Germany. Fido got along very well with an initially quite limited digital network, and lots of people would buy an iPhone even if they knew going in it wouldn’t work in Wawa.
“Infrastructure” is vague. Data is crazy expensive compared to elsewhere, yet the difference in voice rates isn’t comparable. Rogers is charging that much because, in the past, corporate accounts would pay. It sucks for the rest of us now that the user profile is changing.
“Nobody expects a phone to work everywhere in Canada, as they would in Germany.”
Right. However it’s still a population to coverage area ratio which does not favour Canadian carriers.
“Fido got along very well with an initially quite limited digital network”
Well aside from the fact that their coverage was poor even in Vancouver, they were losing money and eventually got bought out yeah they got on well. Some of that, especially the reception in urban areas, could have been fixed with better planning (using a 850 mhz GSM frequency as well as 1900)but in the end it was generally just a question of who would buy their customer base.
I do agree that the customer profile is changing for data, and hopefully all the companies will realize that and change their pricing though the prices will never be comparable to either the US or Europe. However even before data Canadian carriers were being knocked for having higher voice rates than the US, for the reasons I’ve stated, and any carrier which has offered significantly lower rates has tended to go out of business or been bought out (Clearnet).
My point isn’t that data rates could not be lower, or that they won’t go lower, just that comparing what we pay to what they pay in the US or Europe isn’t helpful. The only real useful example actually is Australia in terms of size versus population. Though to your point they do have lower data prices than we do.
“Essentially when comparing rates to the US or Europe Canada has a much smaller population and a much larger geographical area to build a network. Granted the entire nation isn’t covered (most of it isn’t), but still the geographical area covered by the three major companies is very large compared to elsewhere.”
You actually fall for this bullshit FUD from the cell companies? Give me a break! Sure Canada is huge and has a low population density, but the urbanization rate is HUGE. This actually makes it EASIER to set up telecommunications infrastructure. Over half of the population lives in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, or Calgary. Does it really matter if the middle of nowhere up north has no cell service? Who would actually use it? This is NOT a valid excuse.
I can accept the fact that Canada may have to settle for data rates slightly higher than the rest of the world, but there is no excuse for this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomaspurves/452679328/
Michael:
“You actually fall for this bullshit FUD from the cell companies? Give me a break! Sure Canada is huge and has a low population density, but the urbanization rate is HUGE.”
Errmmm… okay.
Now you try convicing the Canadian population that their phones should only work in “Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, or Calgary”. People largely expect their phones where ever they go, and that includes travelling major highways between these areas. Again the company that tried to follow the “Canadians only live in cities” theory of cellular service failed.
I’m sure the other half of Canada who isn’t in one of the major urban areas would be glad to know they’re no longer going to get service so we can get American pricing in Vancouver. Or that there’s a non-urban tax where because they’re in areas of lower population density they have to pay more than people in the major city centres. (This was the case when Fido was still independent and it created no end of ill will between the cariers and their non-urban customers who could not understand why Rogellus was mathing Fido plans in Vancouver and other cities but not for the other 50% of Canada).
As for the chart, I do think that Canada could have data charges closer to Australia though again looking at their coverage map ours might still end up a bit higher, though not to the extent that the graph indicates they currently are.
Australia Telstra coverage map:
http://www.gsmworld.com/cgi-bin/ni_map.pl?cc=au&net=te
Canada’s Rogers coverage map:
http://www.gsmworld.com/cgi-bin/ni_map.pl?cc=ca&net=rw