The Globe and Mail’s Jack Kapica wrote a piece on Rogers data rates and the problems these pose in relation to bringing the iPhone to Canada. Take special note of the insulting comment from Rogers’ communications flack, who managed to both be inappropriately aggressive AND completely avoid the point of Kapica’s article. I wonder if mobile carriers – particularly those in Canada – will ever get it? Not only are they gouging their customers, but they’re leaving a ton of money on the table by completely underestimating the demand for wireless data in Canada.
The big media news yesterday
is that the New York Times will stop charging for TimesSelect, offering the whole paper free online. They say the subscription program was a success, but that they noticed the potential of advertising growth to be greater than subscription growth (which is what most said two years ago, but whatever – better late than never). The key to this, of course, is that the Times still does reporting, unlike most regional or city newspapers that have largely abdicated this function to the wire services.
Ooof. Calling Rogers is painful,
especially when it’s to buy a data plan from them. Nadia got a new phone yesterday – a Treo like mine – and for a device like that, a data plan is pretty important. So I called them up – knowing already what the deal on the table was – and signed up for a 3MB plan… for $25. I feel like Rogers is intentionally laughing at me or something. They invented plans in the late 90s for WAP and have kept charging people through the nose ever since.
Thomas Purves has posted
a comparison of mobile data pricing in Canada and elsewhere in the world, and demonstrates that Canadian rates are by far the highest anywhere. The only *possible* light at the end of the tunnel is that if Rogers does bring in the Apple iPhone, then they’re going to have to do something to address the fact that the iPhone is designed for a pretty high level of network access, or so it seems. With any luck – but I’m not holding my breath – this will benefit Canadian customers across the board.
NYTimes:
Can Papers End the Free Ride Online? I had an experience with something like this a few weeks ago visiting my parents. Someone suggested that the Canadian papers were smart to charge for access, as they mostly do now. We discussed this for a little bit, but didn’t take the discussion very far.
The next day we were looking for info on something in the news. “To Google,” I said, “we’ll find the answer there for sure.” And we typed in a couple words and got our answer. Of course there were no results from barricaded news sites – and the value of open archives was made clear.
Newspapers have been losing readership for years, and no one has ever proven a correlation between declining readership and open archives. If I were a shareholder in a media company, I would demand that the company demonstrate the correlation and if it were not proven, ask that the company fulfill its public service mandate to contribute to the civic life of the city, province, and country.
