This is commendable work. Despite some progress the carriers have made recently towards simplifying plans, overall rate structures remain highly obfuscated in Canada. Therefore tools like this one that can bring any additional transparency are of great value.

A few caveats though, there are a few things the calculator does not take into consideration. On the cost side remember that all minutes are not created equal and nor are all “evenings”. On Rogers, for example, a minute can be one second long and an evening minute may start hours later than on a seemingly identical Fido plan.

The other factor not considered here is quality or value for service. A cheap plan isn’t much good if the network coverage doesn’t reach you or if all the handsets available are ancient crap (here’s looking at you flanker brands).

Some fun games you might be able to play with this tool: Check out the price discrimination by province! Find the best plans for the rather short list of specific phones actually worth buying: BBerry, Droids, Iphone, Pre etc. (once they all come out). Sounds like fodder for future articles.

LINK: www.cellphoneratecalculator.com

Ironically, it was Telus who explains this decision the best: “CRTC makes the only Globalive decision it could“. The addendum to which would be “…after we ourselves, in a pique of legal jackassery, vigorously lodged the very official complaint thus forcing CRTC to abide to the letter of their antiquated and anti-competitive governing act despite it’s obvious contraction of the expressed policy of the Canadian government and people in this case.”

But don’t blame the incumbents. You know, other new entrants were equally pissed if/that Globalive would be seen to be receiving special treatment. The fact is that the Canadian capital markets are too small. All the other entrants (and even the incumbents in the past) have struggled mightily to build out their infrastructure while meeting the ownership requirements of last century’s Canada Telcom Act.

The real culprit here is our own bumbling goverment (Governments plural really) for a decade now, who have failed to reform or de-regulate foreign ownership, and who’ve failed modernize Canada’s regulatory governance in any coherent way to advance Canada in the digital economy.

Tony Clement, we’re looking at you.

What we do know, is that things are looking up in Canada Wireless-wise. Compared, for instance, with our poor American neighbours to the south we now have not one but three (and soon to be more) offering the latest 3G standards all of whom offer, generally, far better reliability than the US’s largest GSM carrier AT&T.

On top of which we now have three carriers offering the iPhone 3GS as well as, we trust, some very nice next-generation androids and blackberries (9700’s) any day now.

It’s going to be a very good Christmas to look for smartphones and broadband sticks in your stockings.

Brush up on the announcement and initial reactions here: Peter Nowak has excellent coverage today of the CRTC call (long time coming) on net neutrality in Canada. Michael Geist and Ars Technica offer some balanced opinion.

What everyone seems to agree on is that CRTC’s framework is reasonable, and is highly progressive relative to where the debate was just a year or more ago. We’ve argued in the past for economic solutions to ISP capacity which is what the CRTC is also stressing.

When it comes possible dirty tricks with packets, the problem will be in enforcement. It’s not clear that the framework will result in ISPs changing any of their current practices (other than increased disclosure). For those of us on teksavvy connections, now perhaps stuck for all time at 5MBps and throttled during all waking hours, that doesn’t sound too hopeful.

Under the framework if there are violations, it’s up to consumers to make a complaint. In the event of a complaint it would then be up to the CRTC to take however long it might take to follow up (for example, it’s now taken about 3-4 years since the ISPs started toying with throttling/DPI for the CRTC to address the issue of net neutrality) and when the CRTC makes a ruling they may side either way. The ISPs have a fair degree of leeway in deciding when traffic management is “needed”.

The current framework also does not apply yet to wireless. The CRTC is promising a separate ruling on wireless. This concept concerns us. If you believe in a principles-based approach to policy, it confuses us how exactly the carrier’s particular choice of last-mile technology should have bearing on that.

Remember that the end game for true innovation in Canada will be the day we can all access fat pipes with a level playing field for voice, video, data and any other service across those pipes whether they be wired, wireless or any combination.

The real problem for now that we consumers want it both ways. We enjoy our convenient cable and dsl broadband, infrastructure which is in fact heavily cross-subsidized by the economies of scale and scope of the digital tv, home phone, video on demand etc. services that your carrier delivers through that same last mile connection.

What we want is our cheap, low-up-front-cost connection to be super fat and completely open without having to watch all those stupid adds on regular tv, or pay the ridiculous cable charges or inflated home-phone fees.

There’s only a few ways we can think of around that dilemma.

a) Either someone goes out and builds a net-new fibre to the home/office at an epic scale (with either public or private investment or both, and note that some cities/municipalities have acheived this sometimes with spectacular success). We’ll defer to Mark Surman on this one (Director of the Mozilla Foundation) who told us once “listen, if you really love the net don’t protest about it, if you want the net to be awesome, don’t expect/demand/ask everyone else to make the net awesome for you, go make it awesome yourself!”

b) We learn to suck it up and pay the full cost of open connectivity infrastructure in exchange for the benefits it brings us (Think a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per home for fibre depending on density). Think of it as part of the capital value of realestate, after homeowners and landlords pay full freight for furnaces, roofing, water heaters etc. internet is just another.

c) Live with our status quo. The CRTC’s new framework is reasonable, if it can be enforced. Increased service transparency may yield more aggressive competition on consistency of service speed and quality. We shall see.

Neither Bell nor Telus would confirm that they would add the iPhone to their lineups. Apple also declined to comment. But people familiar with the matter said the two carriers will announce a working partnership with Apple as early as Tuesday or Wednesday and begin selling the device in time for the launch of their new network next month.

This is pretty epic news and a huge win for Canadians. Not for the sake of the iPhone, which is a perfectly excellent phone, but because it means the HSPA competitive war is now on. Far more than the coming new entrants (though they won’t hurt either) the fact that all three big telcos are now going toe-to-toe in the once Rogers-only universe of GSM can only be good news for the rest of us. In fact, Canada is the only market we can think of where 3 three carriers are offering the speedy fruit-themed widget. We just now need to see what the plans will be.

One also wonders if supplies of 3GS’s at Rogers outlets will also magically improve real quick?

link: Bell, Telus to launch iPhone next month

Coming soon on WirelessNorth.ca: Dear Bell and Telus, please just kiss and makeout and get it over with already.

UPDATE: It appears that triple-carrier iPhone is becoming the norm in various markets including the UK and France. At WirelessNorth.ca we for one welcome this new comoditization of high-end smart phones.

The reason? The iPhone is costing Rogers too much. Apple’s elegant one $199 price doesn’t jibe with Rogers subscriber revenue. Or at least the math doesn’t jibe as well with the kind of margins that Rogers has gotten used to earning off of smartphone subscribers. Rogers is suffering margin compression with the iPhone 3GS. While they love the halo effect of the iPhone, they’d love even more if they could lure you in the store with thoughts of iPhone dancing in your head… and then sell you the exact same voice and data plan but fob you off on, say, a much less subsidized HTC Android for example.

We don’t know if Rogers is revenue sharing on the iPhone with Apple but, apparently, the difference between the actual price of the device and mandated $199 subsidized price is such that Rogers is going so far as to aggressively market the Android down to $79 (and $39 for students).

This is not such a bad story for consumers. The android is a half-decent device, and $39/$79 is the kind of entry point for smartphones that could really start driving penetration of smart phones in Canada (if not, you know, for those whopper monthly bills you’ll still enjoy but we digress). And a few more androids or blackberries in the global marketshare pie chart does help to keep apple honest.

1. Consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice.

2. Consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.

3. Consumers are entitled to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network.

4. Consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers.

5. Broadband providers cannot block or degrade lawful traffic over their networks, favor certain content or applications over others and cannot “disfavor an Internet service just because it competes with a similar service offered by that broadband provider.”

6.Broadband providers must be transparent about the service they are providing and how they are running their networks.

Where is Canada on Net neutrality and digital policy whatsoever? Well there has been consultation, but we don’t have one as yet. A policy that is.

What we do have is a toothless and rather bureaucratic CRTC that doesn’t even enforce it’s own mandates. They have a mandate that does not cover wireless, they are governed by two antiquated legislations the telecom and the broadcast acts and associate regulations, large parts of which have little salience in a world of digital media. We have an Industry Canada ministry that talks about creating competition but just as keen to take the money and run from inflated spectrum auction windfalls.

What this country needs, like any of our industrialized neighbours, is a clear plan that says yes, Canada does choose to be competitive in the global digital economy, and that we have goals and metrics to suggest which policy interventions (as needed) would help us reach those goals and to measure if those policy choices (e.g. the recent spectrum auction) are working or not. Is that too much to ask?

LINK: FCC Chairman Calls for Formal Net Neutrality Rules

The two mobile categories this year are Best Mobile Application and Best in Mobile Marketing.

Here’s the link: Canada New Media Awards

Subject: Incoming Calls are paid(??!!!)

I just arrived in Vancouver from Europe only to find out that in this part of the world you have to actually pay for your incoming calls! And on top of that you get to pay over $30 for a mere 100 min. I thought it was a joke but it turned out it is true.

It is important because people should know that is not the way it is done in developed countries since 1997.

Not only that Andreas but some carriers will charge you long distance fees on top of that even for incoming calls.

Why is this? Well our understanding (but internet please correct us we’ve got this wrong) is that the difference in europe is that carriers pay to each other (and earn) termination fees for incoming calls landing on each other’s network whearas in North America this doesn’t happen (due to the legacy of free local calling on POTS. So in europe the carriers have incentive to encourage incoming calls while in North America it would just be lost revenue opportunity to give away incoming. That being said, a lot of the carriers do offer some kind of free calling plans to numbers on the same network, or some clever folks out there hang on to legacy plans that do offer unlimited incoming.

Hint: free incoming, if you can get it, is a great thing to combine with a service like Jajah that acts as a clever middleman to turn all your calls into a local incoming callback.

Originally presented at FITC Mobile 2009 in Toronto.