Angry Robot

iPhone in Canada: The Math, The Outrage

The base plan costs $60. This includes 150 minutes voice, unlimited “evenings” and weekends (evenings start at 9pm), and 400MB of data. To get necessities like caller ID, an evening that starts at 6pm, and reasonable text message limits, you will add another $20. Then, there’s the $8 “system access fee”, aka bullshit surcharge phrased to sound like something governmental, and our friends the sales taxes. So your $60 is actually $100, all told.

Then factor in 150 minutes a month is basically the “I don’t use a cellphone” plan. It’s seven minutes a day.

Then, consider that 400MB a month isn’t a lot of data, and that you will be thinking twice before using YouTube, the app store, opening email attachments, or emailing pics from the phone’s camera. In other words, the limited data cripples your use of the phone’s features.

Let’s not mention the 3-year contract. Over the course of three years, the cheapest iPhone plan will cost you $3,600. Let’s not forget that by that time, your iPhone will be pathetically out of date and magic future iPhones will be flying around firing lasers at you.

If you want to be the haggard optimist, the WWI soldier in the trench croaking “hey, they only dropped 96 shells on us today,” you’ll point out that these are actually better rates than typically seen in Canada. (Overages are 50 cents a megabyte as opposed to up to $15/MB in some other plans.)

At which point, a chorus of Americans, Europeans, Africans and Asians will spit coffee all over their computers. These may well be the worst iPhone plans in the world.

Anyway, just imagine Ted Rogers firing sith lightning into your wallet and you’ll get the picture.

For more outraged reading:

• Fuck You Rogers, petition (non-swear version: ruinediphone.com)
• Globe article – “These rates are just another indicator that Canadian cellphone rates are really high and that essentially the carriers feel like they can charge whatever they like”
• thread on ehMac.ca
• Reuters article – “an outcry about prices from angry customers”
• BlogTO post
• Comparison to UK and US plans
• Fortune article

UPDATE: da hupdate!