Saturday, April 14, 2007

Candian Cell Phone Companies are about on par with Gas Stations

What the Hell???!!??

I just reimaged my work laptop, so I was sitting here on a Sat morning trying to get things back to normal. Since there's not really anything good on tv, and I my mythbox is sort of out of commision, I was watching tbs when a cell phone commercial comes on. Unlimited phone minutes, data, text and whatever, all for 50 bucks. 50 BUCKS!!! And no contract, to top it all off. 50 BUCKS!!! I just went through the hassle of switching from a Treo to a BlackBerry. I am currently on a voice plan that gives me unlimited evening and weekends and 200 day time minutes for 25 bucks. That was a good deal too. While trying to figure out whether to switched handsets or switch providers for my cell phone I had the company that I'm currently with price out something similar to what I have now for voice (data is somewhat unimportant since I was just using a standard data plan that hadn't changed much). The pricing for the basic same plan as I have now (it had 100 minutes during the day more than what I have now), is now 50 bucks. So I could pay 50 bucks a month here in canada for a voice plan that gives me 300 minutes of voice time during the day and unlimited calling (starting 6) during evenings and unlimited calling during the weekend. In the states I could be paying 50 bucks a month (with now contract) and get unlimited everything. EVERYTHING.

All the time you hear people complaining about gas prices. How the gas stations and companies are all in it together so they can all raise prices and not have anyone undercut their price points so they don't really have to worry about competition, but you almost never hear people complain about the cell phone companies. In this day and age of eletronic toys and being in constant contact, cell phones seem to be as necessary as gas. I know that I'm guilty of complaining when people don't have a cell phone.

I remember a time when Canadian broadband intenet plans where miles a head of the States. We were getting plans with more bandwidth for much cheaper than anywhere in the States. Why are we so far behind in the cell phone battle. It's not like the players are different here in Canada. but maybe that's the problem. When it comes right down to it, it's really only the big monopoly players in other telecom industries that have moved into the cell phone market. The only other exception might be Telus, but I haven't really gone out and done the research to figure out if the majority shareholders are actually different from the other Telcos. Even though the choice is limited, why are we putting up with this? Why are we letting these big corporation push us around. Yes I realize that it's not that simple to change these kind of things. Those e-mails you see going around about boycotting a certain Gas company for a day aren't going to really help, unless you can get an extremely large percentage of the population using that type of gas station to stop using that gas station. Of course that doesn't really change the fact the gas is still there, and you might see a small dip in prices, but that's not going to change the long term problem. It's similar to what the record labels are going through right now, but that's a different rant.