Summary: Cell phone service is much better in the States.

While owning some loss leading assets like the Blue Jays and the Rogers Centre, it’s surprising that Rogers turns a profit doesn’t it? Much of that has to do with its wireless division which I am sure is the cash cow of their business.

I’ve re-activated my cell phone on Rogers now that I’m back in Canada, and so I would like to rant against how it’s such a rip off. Of course, all the other carriers are just as bad, but I’m not with them so I can’t complain.

1. Plans & Contracts

Plans and contracts are where all cell phone carriers make their money so I’m not entirely surprised that they try and rip you off. I guess this is a general complaint about living in Canada, but the 15% tax and $7 System Access Fee on top of the advertised rate is not cool (and by digging in the archives, you can find out that the System Access Fee isn’t even a real fee!). Anyways, the way to beat this is to go on prepaid provided it’s not your land line replacement.

2. Expensive Phones
With Rogers, you have an option of getting almost free phones by signing a contract. The only problem is the contract you have to sign is for three years. That’s crazy. In the States, if you sign a contract for just two years, you can actually *make* money (after rebate) and get a sweet flip phone to boot. So what if you have to sign for an extra year? well the phones are still crazy expensive. Take the RAZR, it’s going for $399 CDN with a three year contract at Rogers, but in the US you can get a hype black version of the phone for $0 (after rebate) with two year contract. Moral of the story is? Get a phone in the US.

3. Stupid Email-to-TEXT
When I was on a Rogers contract previously, I was able to send an email to [phonenumber]@pcs.rogers.com and see it as a text message on my phone. That was convenient and I wrote a little script so people could do it through my site. Recently, Rogers introduced a system to “protect users from spam” whereby you had to send a text back to Rogers in order to read any messages sent to your PCS email. So basically, Rogers earned 15 cents every time you received an email. I did some research today and found out that recently Rogers introduced “Direct Delivery” so I can get back the original functionality. The catch? $5 bucks a month for Direct Delivery. Oh yeah, you have to pay $0 per month to get this feature in the States.

4. Long Distance
I’m always confused with the whole roaming/long distance thing in Canada. So if I’m in an area code that’s not my home area code and I call my home area code I end up having to pay long distance twice? what? There’s a concept called nationwide minutes in the US, so you can receive and dial calls anywhere in the US for the same cost as you would in your home area code. There’s no more long distance, it’s so simple! Why can’t we implement it in Canada? Oh yeah, we have to pay for the Blue Jays.

If cell phones weren’t a necessity in our daily lives now, I wouldn’t suck it up and get one. But I do, so it sucks. On the other hand, there are two goods:

• I didn’t have to pay an activation fee to re-activate.
• Prepaid is cheaper than a plan (I’ll blog about this later)

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: best-of, cellphones, corporations, rogers