Dealing with Rogers in the face of the incoming WIND
Being that WIND is still about 4-6 months away from reaching here in Vancouver, my options for my choice of mobile phone carrier are still limited to Rogers, TELUS, and Bell. Fortunately, all three carriers are running UMTS networks in the city, but being that they have a triopoly, my ability to get a better deal is still quite limited.
However, it seems that Rogers will bend to keep me even though I am within contract.
It works like this: my plan compared to WIND's offerings is $20 more than it really should be. With the time remaining left in my contract, it would be only a few months to recoup the losses incurred by the early-exit. By explaining this to the the rep, she worked out the following for $10-less than what I am currently paying:
- 200 daytime minutes
- 1,000 evenings/weekends (starting at 7 PM)
- Rogers-to-Rogers calling
- Voicemail
- Caller ID
- 1 GB traffic (2x what I have now)
It works out to be slightly better than what I have now and is $10 cheaper. I also get twice the data that I had before.
How does this stack up to WIND? Well, what it means here is that while I will not necessarily get WIND features (such as 5 GB traffic limits and no overages charges, just traffic shaping), I won't have to spend as much staying with my current carrier. On top of that, Rogers is requesting that I extend my subscription by a year to get this sort of pricing.
The last part is making it a bit harder to jump. Do I stay with Rogers for a few more months until WIND makes it way here and then try again, or do I take a gamble and just stay put?
I believe that I will check out TELUS and see what they have to say also.
January 27th, 2010 - 23:42
Great insight. First off, Telus isn’t in business to lower cellphone prices in Canada, they’re there to capture more of a market segment they don’t own today (consider Koodo their FIDO). You can bet that they carefuly reviewed how much revenue cannibalisation they would suffer from their parent brand before they did this.
Second, if you note the fact that they upcoming wireless spectrum auction in Canada (starting at the end of May) could very possibly yield one or two new national or regional competitors, you might also see Telus as thinking the best defence against disruptive entrants is a good offence. Cheekily, they launched Koodo the day that the bidders for the spectrum acution were announced by Industry Canada.
Third, Telus’ last attempt at running thier own MVNO (Amp’d mobile) was an unmitigated disaster, so they’re not exactly superstars at brand/demographic diversification. Hopefully sweatbands and no system access fee/contract appeals more than expensive ringtones, video downloads & MP3 phones didn’t.
And finally… I don’t suspect you’ll see a CDMA iPhone, period. Note that most of the European providers have lowered their prices on the existing GSM models in the last week, and are selling out of stock. This is a typical Apple move – sell the your remaining stock of one product at a discount before releasing an updated version – and wouldn’t you know it, rumours are rife of a new iPhone coming out shortly. But the new one won’t be for CDMA, it will be a 3G model (which the world has been waiting for). CDMA is globally becoming obselete, as a standard it’s barely used outside of the Americas (even in North America it only accounts for around 50% of cell subs). Any new market entrant in Canada will almost certainly be GSM, and Telus and Bell themselves have been openly considering moving to GSM. There’s a reason so few manufacturers make so few (good) phones for CDMA – market share. Would you rather make a phone for the majority of networks in the world, or a small and shrinking minority? All that said, I own a CDMA phone (also), and there’s no real issue with the (voice) technology working, it’s just not very useful the second you get on a plane to most of the rest of the world. Oh, and data speeds suck – there’s that too. Don’t worry, in a few years we’ll all have 4G LTE phones, and this conversation will seem even more pointless. And flying cars… yeah, those too.
ACN Video Phone Project