With Rogers Hi-Speed Internet attached to your computer, you can dowload 90 GB per month for about $50. If you decided to go mobile, that same dowloading will cost you $45,165 (plus $7/month for the data plan). If you are too cheap (or forget) to sign up for the data plan, then 90GB will cost you $4,500,000 (four million, five hundred thousand dollars).
Ted Rogers' press release was short. But when I read it, it was clear to me that the deal was non-exclusive. Only that Rogers will be offering the iPhone in Canada. Then I read newspaper reports that speculated that Rogers had finally caved to Apple in order to take the rug out of all those wannabee cell phone providers currently bidding for cell phone licences (by the way, why was the sale of Fido to Rogers authorised?).
Well, it is now confirmed there will be multiple iPhone providers in Italy, India and Australia.
So I return to my original interpretation and say that Rogers will have a non-exclusive agreement with Apple to provide the iphone. There is NOTHING about the iPhone on the Rogers web site, and yet you can sign up for an availability notification for the RIM 9000 Bold (first thing you see in the Wireless section) which was only announced this week.
And since the announcement that Rogers will be offering the iPhone, Rogers changed the data rates on May 8th. Surfing will now cost you $7 per month plus 15/MB for the first 5MB, $10/MB for next 5MB, $5/MB for next 10MB and $0.50/MB thereafter (Or $665 for a one gigabyte movie, the second gigabyte movie is a bagain at $500). That doesn't sound like caving to Apple to me. And by the way, if you don't bother or forget to sign up for a data plan, 1GB will cost you $50,000! (That would be an expensive movie!).
The irony of course is that it doesn't really matter to Rogers how much you download, the infratructure is there and it is hoplessly underutilised. It just happens that the few people who are willing to pay anything for mobile Internet are willing to pay a lot!
Ted Rogers press release: "We're thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year. We can't tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned."
"Thrilled" might be an understatement.
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