I frequently hear complaints from people in other countries about their mobile phone service. Well, you know what, people in other countries? You can all suck it, because Canada has the worst mobile phone service in the entire fucking world. People living in countries in equatorial Africa look at Canadian mobile phone plans and say “holy shit, are you people serious?”
Here is the latest bit of genius from the ad wizards who came up with the last one: Bell and Telus (which is owned by Bell but maintained as a separate company) want to charge users fifteen cents for every text message they receive. Seriously! Their excuse is “our network can’t handle this staggering stream of data from all these text messages!”
Now, the largest SMS text messages clock out at 1120 bits (of course most texts aren’t anywhere near that large considering how long most texts are, but hey, let’s use the maximum). Now, Canadians (all of them, including the ones signed on with services like Rogers or Fido, which Bell doesn’t own and therefore we shouldn’t count, but again, let’s play “fudge the numbers for Bell’s benefit”) sent 10.1 billion text messages last year. So if we do the math, we see that SMS messages took up a total of 11.3 trillion bits of bandwidth! THAT’S SO MANY BITS!
Or, more simply, it’s about one and a half terabytes of bandwidth over the course of a year. That’s not small, but it doesn’t sound like, you know, enough to crash the cell network or anything.
But wait, it gets even better! See, Bell and Telus plan to charge users not for the texts they send, but the texts they receive! So if you get spam texts (increasingly common even despite filtering attempts), or unwanted texts from that person you slept with and then decided WHOA BAD IDEA, you have to pay for them. Very generously, Bell and Telus representatives have said they’ll review any contested SMS bill as regards unwanted texts, with all the legendary speed and faithful service Canadians have come to expect from Bell Canada (official motto: “no, fuck you“).
Of course, thanks to this post, I know now that Apple is so pissed off at Rogers – exclusive vendor of the iPhone in Canada – over Rogers’ shitty-ass data plans (sixty bucks for four hundred megs of data? WTF) that they’re refusing to sell iPhones in Canadian Apple Stores and diverting shipments of iPhones meant for Canada to Europe instead.
I love living in a technological communications duopoly! It’s awesome!
Related Articles
25 users responded in this post
Don’t worry! A libertarian told me that The Market will sort things out.
So given that I need to buy a new cell phone this week, which company will leave me feeling less dirty and abused?
Jake: I’d go with Fido. Rogers may have bought them, but they still have decent customer service and fairly reasonable pricing plans for anything not data-heavy.
My American cell phone plan with Verizon charges me $0.10 for every text message sent or received, though I can avoid it by signing up for an unlimited text add-on, which currently isn’t worth it since I only send about 1 text message per fortnight.
this is much ado about NOTHING. most plans included unlimited text to some degree. the charge is only for those on bare bones plans. waaaaah!
still, telus and bell dropped the ball BIG TIME by making this announcement the same week Rogers is taking it for screwing the pooch with the iPhone plans. all of a sudden nobody hates Rogers, we all hate Telus/Bell for no reason.
idiots. all of them.
Move to Australia and then we’ll talk about the worst phone service in the world. Telstra (used to be government owned, is now only 51% government owned which means precisely nothing) owns all the infrastructure. So if someone wants to, say, bring us fast broadband, they have to go through Telstra, who, of course, is going to charge them a fortune for it, making it uneconomical. In areas of high population density (central Melbourne and Sydney) it’s cheaper to lay another set of cables, right next to the Telstra ones. Outside of those areas, we can just suffer.
lilacsigil: at least there are companies putting down seperate lines. I live in the downtown core of the most populous city in my country, and I’m stuck with one of two providers who own the telco infrastructure. All of our providers currently rent a connection from them, from a government-mandated percentage of their lines, and they companies in question have even begun to restrict access to that.
This could be the stuff of a really lively international chat: who’s got the most abusive phone oligopoly in the first world? Oh, and Clayton, there’s lots of people who wish the market would be allowed to work in their country; frankly, I think much of the will in Canada to keep protecting Bell, Rogers etc. from foreign competitors has evaporated in the last week. Would the Finns or even the Am*r*c*ns exploit us any worse?
I think the Finns would. They always struck me as a shifty race.
After hearing stories from the US and Canada, I will never again complain about the service I get. I guess mobile phone service is the one thing we can brag about over here in the Philippines.
Last year, T-Mobile (US) tried to block users of their cheap monthly data plan (T-Zones) from using third-party mobile interent apps like Gmail or Opera Mini. They wanted to limit data acces to their shitty proprietary T-Zones browser, which of course is completely useless. Not only that, when users complained about it, T-Mobile denied they were doing any such thing — but they also told me (with a straight face): “We’re not doing anything to block third-party apps, but we don’t support them either, so if you’re having a problem with Gmail on your phone, you will have to take it up with Google. Or… you know, you could always sign up for our vastly more expensive full-service data plan. Then we’re quite certain all your favorite third party apps will work. No, we’re sure we’re not blocking third-party apps on the cheap plan — where would you get that idea?”
They knew that we knew they were lying to us, and they didn’t care.
I eventually figured out how to hack my RAZR V3t so that it tricked T-Mobile’s data network into allowing access for third-party apps.
Man, being an antisocial wierdo who’s never owned a cell phone (never maintained an IM account until just this year!) has never felt better.
“this is much ado about NOTHING. most plans included unlimited text to some degree. the charge is only for those on bare bones plans. waaaaah!”
It’s still a monumentally stupid plan (would you pay to RECEIVE phone calls or letters, even unwanted ones?).
Apparently, plenty of cellular phone users would, since that’s what “air-time” is.
I wonder if Virgin, which uses the Bell network, will end up following suit. They’ve already tried my patience by disabling their SMS-to-e-mail gateway.
I pay 3.99 for 400 texts a month, sent and received. It’s not so bad when you only have a forty dollar bill, with unlimited weekends/nights and such. The spam texts are quite annoying, I agree. But I really only get maybe one oevery few months, so I don’t really have to worry about it much.
Haha, so MY personal server uses the same amount of data as ALL OF CANADA’s SMS traffic.
Interestingly, that has been costing me something between 600 and 1000 bucks a year. I am not even going to TRY to figure out what that would be on a per-text basis.
All I want is for my phone to be at the end of one of the tubes…
Andrew W, how do you feel about Finnish food?
Bell Canada’s Mission Statement:
“To fuck over everyone who needs a phone.”
Rogers caved!
http://www.iphoneincanada.ca/iphone-news/rogers-announces-6gb-for-30-iphone-3g-data-plan/
But can you really beat Verizon in terms of cluelessness?
@ Kyle: I think it’s yucky. 😉
I also believe that Finnish people are so named because they have actual fins somewhere on their body. 😉
Last I heard, in the Philippines, people send about 25 million TEXT MESSAGES A DAY for a fraction of a dollar. And incoming calls are free.
What’s with the telecomms of North america?
AT&T charges 20 cents per text message unless you’ve got a messaging plan or bundled plan.
Last I heard, in the Philippines, people send about 25 million TEXT MESSAGES A DAY for a fraction of a dollar. And incoming calls are free.
We’ve been abusing SMS since 1999. Keep in mind: 25 million texts a day? That’s already a massive decrease since they started charging for text messages back in 2000.
I’m a filthy American, and I have to pay 15 cents for incoming texts, I think.
I also don’t have cell phone service at my house, either.