Re: Angry Canadian
 

You know what they say about the squeaky wheel. I originally signed a contract with the $7 "unlimited internet" option after the salesgirl guaranteed I could access my gmail account and browse more than the branded commerce sites. After a brief conversation with the sales manager about canceling my contract under misrepresentation, they gave me a 50% rebate on their top tier data plan (at the time) for the duration of my contract.

The data plan rates now are ridiculous. I'm hoping we get some better competition before my contract is up.

Re: Angry Canadian
 

Let's hope the CRTC hearing goes well for Wind. Does anybody know if there will be coverage for Wind in Mississauga??

Re: Angry Canadian
 

So it's actually web only through a proxy of some kind? No ssh will go through?
Maybe DNS proxy (iodine) ? :)

If i can get ssh, anything else can be tunneled over, don't they have an unlimited ssh plan? (one can dream haha ;)

Re: Angry Canadian
 

Should be, they got in everywhere but Quebec...

Though from the links below I can only hope that rogers / bell / telus starts rolling out their quebec AWS too to kick videotron a bit so we actually do have competition! I'm afraid though that they want to be in as segregated frequencies as possible so to net let people switch by keeping their phone (so long for the environment)...

Re: Angry Canadian
 

I've just started a month-to-month deal with Fido. The start-up costs are steep. $35 for the SIM, then $35 to activate it. Whatever. I expected no better.

I'm paying $40 a month, no extra fees: $15 for minimal (50mins/mo) voice, $25 for 500mb data. EDGE seems good enough for basic web surfing on the bus, checking e-mail, IM chatting, and even, if I'm patient, downloading maps.

I don't like talking on the phone anyway, so 50 mins should do me. And I don't see myself getting to 500 MB when I can't really do VoIP or stream media and I just jump on WiFi whenever possible, which is quite often in my usual day.

Re: Angry Canadian
 

Ouch, didn't realize they were charging _70$ !!_ for a freaking SIM!
I managed to get free voicemail with that 15$ contract and 50 more minutes free for a year... though, i have been a client for a long time and said i really wanted to leave, etc (1h on the phone ...) but that was before the 15$ plan actually existed and was only in "retention".

Re: Angry Canadian
 

I'm on FIDO (I'm in Montreal) but I simply don't use data. I'm on Pay-as-you-go, and actually, on average, I get away with LESS than $10 a month*. But yes, I use the phone very sparingly; rarely enough that even at $10/mo, $0.30/min I am still accumulating airtime.

Data on prepaid is highway robbery here. $0.05/kB; they don't even show that rate anywhere. On postpaid plans, the (no-data-plan) data rate is $0.03/kB, which is still extortion.

I hope Wind will have reasonable roaming agreements in La Belle Province, because I don't trust Quebecor to have reasonable plans. Right now, they resell Rogers GSM service, but it's not cost-effective unless you also sign your entire life over to them (Cable TV, internet, home phone). So I think they will use their own network simply as a tool to rope you into their other services.

Joe.
* due to THEIR accounting problems. They can't get automatic refill to work for me; so every few months I call them up, they try to set it up again, and extend my current balance by 2 or 3 months. So I only pay $10 9 or 10 months a year.

Re: Angry Canadian
 

There is NO WAY I'm signing a contract. I'm willing to throw away that $70 sign-up fee and get a new SIM with someone else (for yet another $70, I bet), rather than lock-in to a plan that will jail me in Fido's EDGE world, even as compatible 3G comes to my city in a few months... And I would have gotten prepaid, too, but there's no data add-on, and I'm not paying those insane rates for data.

Re: Angry Canadian
 

And some local carriers. Because I get 3G data using T-Mobile bands but the voice is on ATT bands. $10 for unlimited data.

Re: Angry Canadian
 

wtf? I just activated a sim for my Mom a month ago. I've got the bill in front of me right now. $39.20 after taxes for activation and $10/mo for 60m airtime. I've never paid more than $35 with fido for activation.

To others, my data plan covers everything. voip, im, ssh, exchange sync, a-gps, blah blah. Perhaps they block these services on their branded phones, but I've never used a branded phone. You get what you pay for. ;)

The $7 "unlimited internet" was actually a branded-only WAP option, which is how I got them to give me a cut rate on a real data plan under false representation.