I’ve spoken about the Canadian mobile market (or lack thereof, depending on your viewpoint) and how difficult it is for a consumer in this mobile environment with so little competition. It seems as though there might have been a slight change…..
Today I was reading MobileSyrup and saw a story on a plan that being offered to certain Rogers customers to combat Public Mobile’s lower priced plans that had recently hit the market.
It seems that Rogers got a bit nervous and started offering their current customers a very nice plan if they just called in and asked for it.
Currently our plan is as follows and since people like lists, let me use one now:
- Unlimited Evening and Weekend Minutes
- Unlimited Weekday minutes
- Early Evening Calling from 6 PM ( If I have unlimited evening, weekend, and weekday minutes why do I need this?)
- Call Forwarding
- Voicemail
- Unlimited Text/Picture/Video messages (Do people still use this stuff?)
- Call Display
- Name Display
- Unlimited Canadian Long Distance
The Loyalty Plan (that’s the real name showing up on my account on the web) that Rogers is currently offering is the same; the only difference being that Sly and I were sharing 2 GB of data monthly and now we’re getting 4 GB each.
The cost? Previously, my line was $65/month and Sly’s was $35. Now, each line is $50. No savings but such a huge leap as far as data that I’m quite happy I called in and spent a half hour with the lovely young woman from Dartmouth.
There are some caveats: Sly and I own our devices outright and we’re not on a contract, both conscious decisions made by the two of us to give us the most flexibility possible. If we were on a contract or still owed money on our devices, they would have made us pay those off before allowing us to jump on this plan.
As an aside, I’ll share the details at a later date but lately I have used Roam Mobility for my US cellphone needs lately. Unlimited voice/data/text in North America for $5/day. Rogers does have a service called Roam Like Home which allows for a flat fee of $5/24 hour period to cover Voice/Data/Text as well but the problem was that it would still use your ‘bucket’ of data associated with your account. A very tough proposition when you only really had 1 GB to play with each month.
I’ve been known to wander different US cities late at night, drunkenly befriending any and all who would listen to my inane Canadian babbling all the while streaming Google Music until I get back to my room. It’s happened before, I’m sure it will happen again. But I simply couldn’t do that with only a GB of data to play with.
Hopefully this increase in data will allow for a little more freedom at home and away. Frankly, I’m quite happy they’ve at least put something in place to make my spending $100 a month fee like it has value. We’ll see how long that feeling lasts. 😉
Oh yeah, Happy Canada Day!