What the hell is wrong with the ISP and mobile phone business in Canada?
Rogers Cell Phone MascotGone are the days when you could just buy a service. Now, everything you do is an attempt to reduce the service levels below useless, or ding you for "extras" (no one has the guts to charge extra yet for services like "phone rings when someone's calling you," but that day will come). It's all about getting maximum ARPU (average revenue per user).
This week, Tod Maffin got me to fiddle with a Bell cell phone, so he could record the experience for his technology column on CBC Radio. It was rather ironic that two geeks spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out how to download a movie and watch it on the cell phone. Not only do they want to increase your spending, but they can't be bothered to make it easy for you to do that.
Today Techdirt has a good piece about Rogers throttling back its Internet speed for customers using torrents and other peer-to-peer downloading services. Their latest step is to reduce the speed of traffic that's encrypted.
What's wrong with this picture? One of the most common uses for encryption is e-mail, which should be the fastest thing in the pipeline, not the slowest.
Need more evidence there's something wrong with service in Canada? Here's Mark Evans: Wireless Deals in Canada?; Wow! Signs of Competition in Canada; Less Regulation in Canada, Less Competition. See also Boris Mann on prices higher than Mexico.
My very small act of defiance was to buy a smart phone that can access wireless LANs instead of tying me to buying all my bandwidth from the phone company. I had to buy a phone from Europe in order to pull that off, because the same phone distributed in North America has the wireless capability removed. (See Boris on his Nokia E61.)
What's wrong with this picture? I'm having trouble seeing what's right with this picture. We spend more to get less service, and valuable functions are disabled before they get to market.
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