The iPhone in Canada?

Now that the iPhone has been unlocked (and for free!), it’s much easier for those of us north of the border to get one, especially with the price dropping a substantial $200 from the original $599USD price tag. I decided against it before but I was looking at buying the new iPod Touch. Then I thought with the 16GB model costing around the same price as an 8GB iPhone, wouldn’t the phone be a better choice? I only need about 8GB of music at any given time anyways and, well, it means I don’t need to carry a separate phone around.

There’s still one problem with bringing the iPhone to Canada, though and that’s the issue of data plans. In order to utilize the iPhone to it’s full potential, really, you have to have a good data plan. Just about all the unique features of the iPhone such as the seamless YouTube integration and Google Maps use a great deal of data bandwidth which is probably why the monthly plans from AT&T all include an unlimited data plan starting from just 60 bucks a month.

A quick look at the two major GSM wireless providers reveal that there is no equivalent unlimited plan from either Fido or Rogers. 60 bucks will get you a measly 25MB of bandwidth each month from Fido and the Rogers site is so difficult to navigate that I couldn’t find another data plan beyond five dollars for 2MB each month. They do, however, have Blackberry plans available but even the $90 a month option only includes 25MB of data. Personally, I think it’s absurd to even think 25MB a month is good enough for a Blackberry plan.

There’s actually a good reason why this is the way things are in Canada, really.

There is no competition in mobile phones here. Prior to AT&T’s takeover of Cingular, there were three major providers for GSM (and an additional four for CDMA) in the United States. Now there are only two, but they’re the AT&T and T-Mobile juggernauts. Here in Canada, we have…one. That’s right. Although they maintain different names, Rogers and Fido are actually the same company. In total, we only actually have two major wireless providers here in Canada…Rogers/Fido (GSM) and Telus (CDMA) and as such, there’s no real reason to compete when it comes to prices. In fact, of all developed countries, Canada has some of the highest prices in the world when it comes to mobile phone services. We’re at least twice as expensive as the United States and our plans would be laughed at in any Asian country with advanced telecommunications like South Korea or Japan.

What can we do about this? Well, nothing. With a population just over 33 million, Canada isn’t a large enough market to sustain additional wireless companies. There are several others, the largest of which is probably Bell Mobility but their customer base is very small compared to Rogers and Telus. As such, I wouldn’t expect wireless data plans to be a reasonable price anytime soon. We know that a reasonably priced, unlimited data plan is possible because Fido has offered it twice in it’s history. Once when the company first started and $75 got you an unlimited everything (talk, text, data, all options) plan and a few years ago when the HipTop was still commercially available ($40 for unlimited data + 200 minutes, I believe). However, there’s no reason for any wireless provider to actually make these plans available again since they basically have a monopoly.

The good news, though, is that most major metropolitan areas in Canada such as Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and probably even Edmonton and Calgary have widespread wireless hot-spot coverage. I can get a free wireless signal anywhere in downtown Vancouver and just about every coffee shop has it as a free service. It’s not truly untethered data but for now, I guess that’s what we’ll have to settle for. I guess that’s the price we pay for living in such an otherwise awesome country.

If you enjoyed this post, be sure to subscribe to my full feed RSS and follow me on Twitter!

del.icio.us Digg Reddit Netscape StumbleUpon