GSM in Canada - Robbers Communications (er, Rogers)

I visited a friend in Canada this past weekend. GSM in Canada is like a large percentage of the supermarket business in Uruguay - the "appearance" that there are competitors but they are all the same company.

Cellular service - especially anything having to do with data - was absolute RAPE! It was actually cheaper for me to send a text message ROAMING than it was for my friend and the per-kilobyte data charge ROAMING was less than what the locals pay UNDER CONTRACT. Canadian media is a mafia tightly controlled out of Ottawa and there are really only... five companies and the government in the media business. Your GSM phone showed two networks "Fido" and "Rogers" - except about five years ago Rogers (referred to universally by the locals as Robbers) - bought Fido. Fido had been reasonably priced but they were not in the good graces of Ottawa - and the market is so small in terms of users and the territory so large its hard for a smaller company to make a profit. Most of the cellular plans will sell you 150 minutes for the same price Americans pay for 1000. But that's not really the final price...

Robbers charges a CDN$6.50 "system access fee" which is not included in the plan price either. They also CHARGE EXTRA for "features" like caller ID and voicemail. Oh, and the concept of "long distance" still applies although they will hit you with a charge for "unlimited Canadian long distance." Robbers' coverage is OK, I didn't use GSM very much because I was "on vacation." It'll be interesting to see what I get charged for a couple of uses of Exchange push email and a random MMS message I received.

It's also very strange that they do business under a family name. There actually is a Ted Robbers, er, Rogers that owns the whole thing. I don't know of any other nation where the GSM carrier is so obviously family owned and so obviously politically connected.

Monday was a government holiday in Canada so most people had the day off. A Robbers telemarketer called my friend since he shares an account with his roommate. The telemarketer got SO shouted at when first of all he kept calling my friend "Catherine" even though DUH it was obviously a male voice on the line.... my friend just SNAPPED when he used a pushy sales tactic of ignoring the customer saying NO and trying to close the sale by saying "So can I ship you that new Nokia phone? We'll even waive the activation and shipping charges!" Such a deal. Activation and shipping charges on top of all the other nickels and dimes they ding their customers with. Besides, "Catherine" signed a contract a year ago - accepting the phone would add on two more years which is the goal. (There's talk in the Canadian press of another GSM carrier getting into the market and strangely enough it'll be Egyptian-held Orascom who might be backing it. I'll believe it when I see it....) The telemarketer stuck to his script and offered "Catherine" a "free analysis" of how she could "reduce" her bill. Want to know what it was? Reduce the number of minutes contracted. Duh. Of course the bill goes down - maybe. Might go way up when she goes over that tiny little pittance of minutes she changed to from the other tiny little pittance of minutes.

The other carriers smell blood in the water. One of them is running an ad campaign that says "Ditch that system access fee."

They're also in the cable TV business. The cable TV mafia in Canada is the same as the wired/wireless phone mafia. Robbers is not as bad as Shaw - at least they let you lease that soon-to-be-obsolete cable box. Shaw charges CDN$800 for the same Scientific Atlanta Explorer.

TiVo is the gold standard of personal video recorders. However, the only TiVo available in Canada is analog because.... it's the exact same platform and headend as in the USA, and there are "some" sets with cablecard/QAM tuning that make it into the CDN market - but no CDN cable company has implemented cablecard. That nifty dual cablecard TiVo available in the USA *could* work in Canada if the media mafia there decided to give their customers the option.