B. Mann Consulting

Alec Saunders reposted a chart and some data from Seaboard Group's report on Canadian cell phone pricing -- Lament for a Wireless Nation. The summary is

• Canada has lower cell phone usage than small African nations like Botswana
• Pricing, bundles, and market growth were much better when there was competition (before Clearnet and Microcell aka Fido got bought)
• First hand experience in buying a pay as you go SIM card in Mexico has lower rates for local and long distance than Rogers regular pricing back in Canada 

Of course, this is at the same time that we now have wireless number portability -- as of yesterday, March 14th to be exact. But since there is no competition, it will really only let highly pissed off consumers switch from their current bad provider to one of the other bad choices. Maybe at least we'll see a flood to Rogers/Fido where GSM phones and SIM cards rule...but it's not like I'm overly happy with the service either.

I'm currently still in Torino, Italy, although I'm heading out to Milan, then Bologna tomorrow, and will be in Brussels by the end of the week in time for FOSDEM.

I'm writing a bit about mobile technologies here in Italy over on 2010.dailyvancouver.com (check the Tech Talk section). I've got a Vodaphone SIM for my Nokia 6630 with UMTS-based 3G service (around 350kbps) and the experience has been fantastic.

So, while we had our symposium, the relative maturity of the European vs. Canadian mobile technologies certainly did come up. One example I used was how there is a mobile data plan here that gives you 9GB of transfer for 40EU. On Fido, which is my provider back home, this would cost $270,000 based on the listed per MB charges of $30. Actually, I did the calculation in my head initially and everyone was shocked/amused by the figure of $27,000...and then we figured out we were still an order of magnitude off!

Over at TorCamp, Alec Saunders hears that Rogers and Shaw may be blocking podcast downloads:

While at Torcamp I have heard from several sources that Rogers and Shaw are blocking podcast downloads.  After two to three downloads, the data stops.

I highly doubt this is true: I subscribe to several podcasts here in Vancouver, and am connected to Shaw. No blockage here. If this *is* true, it would be a major issue (kind of like throttling BitTorrent traffic). Alec, let's get confirmation on this, because it doesn't sound realistic right now.

Update: Patrick Dinnen left a comment, pointing especially to Apple forums where this is being discussed. Virtually all of the complaints seem to be limited to Rogers customers back east. The factor seems to be anything that downloads the same file from multiple servers -- which is consistent with Apple's use of Akamai, as well as P2P programs that use multiple download sources.