May 16, 2008
Leave it to Beaver
Like it or not, big bad Rogers will be the exclusive provider of Apple's beautiful and magnificent and world-changing iPhone, and as each week goes by it's getting harder and harder to mitigate disgust for the former with adoration for the latter.
It was nice, then, to find out that Bell turned their Norm MacDonald–voiced beaver into something truly great: a great big middle finger to Rogers (and Apple). Bell's ad in this week's NOW sends up the familiar and ubiquitous iPod silhouette with the almost-as-ubiquitous beaver to pimp Bell's own product—"Canada's largest mobile music library." Take that, iTunes! Sort of!
The ad would be even better if we weren't as ambivalent about Bell as we are about Rogers: earlier this week the CRTC decided to not provide "interim relief" to customers and wholesalers whose traffic Bell was throttling. The CRTC will make a final decision by the end of the year, but what's unfortunately clear already is that Rogers and Bell are in a race to see which of the two largest telecommunication companies can provide worse service to their customers. Here's hoping this ad triggers some kind of country-wide race to the bottom that sees the mutual destruction of both parties, and new and fair competitors rising from their ashes to provide us all with literal and figurative salvation.
Until then—well, we'll have to just deal. And buy iPhones.
Thanks to reader Aric Guite for the tip and photo.
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I really don't see whats so great here. But I don't fall to pieces every time I see ads, so maybe its just me.
Sorry, why do you hate Rogers now? And please, be specific.
Shall I count the ways?
You know, you can buy an iPhone now and hack it to run on pretty much whatever network you want. That's what the IT guy here did 4 months ago.
Please explain logistics of hacking a GSM phone to work on a CDMA network.
Otherwise you're limited to Rogers/Fido (same dif) in Toronto. Not "any network" as you claim...
Also don't forget that Rogers' data rates are obscene, and a major part of the appeal of the iPhone is ubiquitous web browsing.
Another good reason to resist the hype and not buy this over-rated gizmo.
It's too bad that if we want a phone that works in most of the rest of the world we're stuck with Rogers/Fido.
David, seeing a lot of anti-rogers sentiment, not a lot to back it up.
I've gone on record stating that Rogers has always been a little behind what is a feasible amount of data usgae with their plans. But it IS getting better. Unfortunately, you're on the leading edge of the users. The vast majority don't use their devices the way you do. For YOU, the plans don't make sense, granted. And I wish they had some answer for that.
So, yeah, they're a frustration FOR YOU. For their business, not so much.
brokenengine, aren't you a current (or at least former) employee of Rogers?
My issues with Rogers aren't limited to their data usage plans—which are ridiculous and which Marc has done a spectacular job at picking apart. It's Bittorrent throttling, it's cost, it's customer service, etc. They're a frustration and everyone I know. Sorry.
I AM a rogers employee, and I DO agree that their stance when it comes to data usage is behind the times. Again though, the average customer isn't on the cutting edge of usage that you're describing.
I believe that they need to make themselves viable in the future, they need to "get with the times" as far as the data plans and usage plans go. At the very least, offer higher end usage plans, so that users such as yourself can take advantage of it, because you are becoming less and less of a minority. However, I'm not in marketing. And just about every big company is going to cater to the majority. I'm not saying don't be frustrated (I would be too), I'm just telling you to look at the big picture, as a business.
And Hey don't be sorry. It's not like it's any comment on me personally. I'm the first one to say they do some things arcanely. But I also think we're better than most if not all of our competition.
As advertising, it's a lousy strategy because to the reader just casually skimming NOW (which, let's face it, is the only way NOW can be read) it looks like another iPod ad.
Patrick: It's evidently distinctive enough to have warranted an article on Torontoist. That must count for something, strategy-wise.
At a glance I thought it was a localised iPod ad for Canada ...
Tuds
@brokenengine: there's nothing "cutting edge" about G3 nor about being interested at surfing on your phone and not having to take out a second mortgage.
I have never ever seen a web page on a phone because I refuse to:
a. buy crappy ass phones rogers sells
b. pay $50/MB on an "unauthorized" device
The sad fact is that consumers don't know about realities of mobile and Rogers along with Telus and Bell like it that way.
Established oligopoly now results in 3 simple things:
1. service is getting crappier
2. prices are rising
3. consumers are getting squeezed for more while getting less
And it's not like I'm asking to innovate or offer something new and exciting. No... not at all... I just don't want to be treated like a retard (access fees and sms) and feel like I'm being shafted in the ass with a 6 foot pole every time I look at my bill.
My prediction for the iPhone are along these lines:
1. $500-600 bucks with 3 year contract
2. $60-80/m for a crappy data plan... probably around 100-300MB.
4. clearly, $50 activation
4. not sure what it will be yet, but rogers will find something else to charge for that should be included. If there's a legal way to screw consumers, rogers will find it. My money's on ridiculously stupid minute plans.
It really made me laugh when I read brokenengine's "better than most if not all of our competition"... what competitors? The only one there was, you bought and now driving it into the ground.
"The CRTC will make a final decision by the end of the year, but what's unfortunately clear already is that Rogers and Bell are in a race to see which of the two largest telecommunication companies can provide worse service to their customers."
Just to make this clear, this whole throttling thing is Bell upping the ante by making service worse for people who AREN'T even their customers.
The independant ISPs use Bell's copper to get to your home, but the internet connection is not routed through Bell's uplink, the ISP provides their own connection to the Internet.
Unbelievably ballsy.
The DSL-reselling ISPs' own connections to the Internet aren't entirely relevant, because traffic congestion on the links that they do share with Bell and its other customers could still be disruptive (network connections, like chains, are only as strong as their weakest links).
Some kind of traffic shaping is necessary for quality of service reasons, so that latency-sensitive applications like VoIP aren't clobbered by high volumes of less urgent traffic. The way to sort that out properly, of course, is to privilege VoIP traffic, not to stomp all over peer-to-peer. But the conspiratorially minded might note that Bell (and Rogers, also known for limiting torrents) is in the business of selling, among other things:
They're not likely to be looking out for Internet telephone users, but clobbering torrents for its own sake sure doesn't hurt their interests.
Another point to consider is that torrent clients are sources of constant traffic, day and night. Web browsing is inherently more bursty, and of course you can only do it when you're awake. The networks that Bell and Rogers built for their broadband customers were designed to provide "always on" Internet access, but now it's also always busy.
It's kind of hard to tell how much of the current throttling is due to genuine congestion concerns, how much to a desire to limit uses of the network that compete with the corporate parent's own interests, and how much to a small-minded, fussy desire to make the network utilization graphs look like they did five or ten years ago.