Long Nguyen

Rich People Won’t Buy the iPhone 3G in Canada

That’s right! I talked to someone who makes over $100,000 a year and he said: “Go sign the Fuck You Rogers petition“. I say: Forget my blog, forget about reading this crap I’m typing and go sign it!

$60/month for 150 weekday minutes, unlimited evening and weekends (9pm to 7am), 75 SMS, visual voicemail, unlimited access to Rogers and Fido hotspots, 400 MB of data. That’s it. I’m not leaving anything out. That’s everything. You want caller ID, more text and some other stuff? Pay more. That’s Rogers’ offer.

When I wrote the other day about the possible cost of the iPhone in Canada, I was dead on. What I was completely wrong about was everything customers get for what they pay.

These are the iPhone 3G plans offered by Rogers. I found a nice comparison between the plans in UK, USA and Canada.

Roger tried to defend their prices. “Unlimited plans could end up costing customers more for what they don’t use”, they say. That statement makes absolutely no sense because Rogers never gave customers a decent data plan to have enough people to use data to actually be able to determine what people really use!

For your information, the iPhone can play YouTube videos. One minute of video is about 2 MB, so it takes 200 minutes of videos to reach the 400 MB limit. Considering a music video is about 4 minutes, that’s about 50 music videos. Browsing, email and its attachments, sending photos, App Store downloads, song downloads on iTunes, Maps and GPS have not even been taken into account. (This mental calculation has been done pretty quickly, please correct me if I’m wrong)

Also, there is unlimited access to Rogers and Fido hotspots. Are you kidding me? There aren’t many of those, and wherever there are any of those, you will find a completely free one either in the same place or really not far away. If you don’t know about them, I will personally take it upon myself to find you one.

I wasn’t thinking of stealing an iPhone 3G from Rogers, because I really like the fact that it has the GPS feature, but it’s useless without decent access to data usage.

Finally, I don’t like to put a link to a website more than once, but I have to do it in this situation. Rogers asked for it. Fuck You Rogers.

I wonder if Apple knew anything about these plans when any papers were signed.