Well! It certainly seems that news of Rogers’ data plan tariffs for the iPhone has not precisely been greeted with unanimous hosannas of joy, to put it mildly.
Whilst we can’t exactly say with a straight face that we were pleased with the tariffs, hey, paying a lot for everything is what happens when you live in The Best Place On Earth™, so we were actually prepared for the plans to be significantly worse. And even the cheapest Rogers plan more than comfortably covers the usage we actually make of a phone, which is pretty much nothing other than “message storing service,” and virtually all our data transfer will be done over WiFi, so personally there’s nothing there that bothers us enough to get upset about. And in any case, hey, it’s still a significantly better deal than a Crackberry plan from Rogers, which is about the most we figure one could reasonably have expected.
However, others most certainly disagree! We find particularly amusing a 2225 2614 3277 and counting post on digg which directs the reader to a site which expresses their displeasure in extremely direct terms indeed. Whilst generally we wish to avoid the profane and scatological in our posts here, as that merely demonstrates one’s lack of true wit, in this particular case we’ll make an exception to underline the rage Rogers has provoked. OK, fine, we’re not being highbrow, we just think their link is funny:
Hard to mistake their sentiment, indeed. [UPDATE: Aw, they've toned the rhetoric down to G-rated. Shucks. It was much funnier originally!]
And if you’re a Facebook person, like we’re not, there’s a group for you:
and there’s another petition to sign here:
Rogers Canada iPhone Data Plan Petition
and even more rage-enabling links to be found here:
http://www.iphonepetition.ca/ (redirects to a blog post as I write)
In the meantime whilst we wait to see if these various initiatives do indeed serve as an epiphany for Rogers to change their ways — good luck with that, guys — Rogers’ subsidary Fido seems to be providing nontrivial additional benefits for identical cost with their plans — specifically, the evening option starts at 5 PM instead of 6 PM (and I would suspect that the non-optioned also starts at 7 PM and lasts until 8 AM instead of 7 AM, in keeping with non-iPhone differences between Fido and Rogers plans), membership in their FidoRewards program, and Fido provides per-second billing which I do not believe the Rogers plan does. So of your choices (well, choice-and-a-half or so) looks like Fido is the clear winner here. Good doggy!
And as a final note to you all — hey, it could be a whole whack worse. Check out what you’ll be paying if you live in Norway, for instance — $80 for 100 minutes and 100 megabytes? OK, that does strike us as over the top; the Rogers plans are positively generous compared to that!
