The bogus, made-up System Access Fee that Canada’s mobile phone providers use to intentionally and despicably dupe their customers may soon be history. With our telcos basking in some of the highest rates anywhere on the planet, don’t go thinking it’s out of the goodness of their hearts, though. It’s because of new competition entering [...]

People are scamming the city’s parking machines to the tune of $1 million per year. Apparently you can use an expired pre-paid credit card to park for free because the machines don’t check to see if the cards have credit left on them. The Toronto Parking Authority has known about this since 1998, but hasn’t [...]

As we've pointed out many times before, Rogers boasts an exceptional brand of contempt for its non-business wireless customers, but the launch of Apple's desperately anticipated iPhone has exposed a whole set of new lows for the Toronto-based company. Due to a breathtakingly boneheaded policy in place by the company's National Planning Department, existing customers currently under a Rogers contract and who have upgraded their handset within the year are prohibited from purchasing an iPhone. At all.

Users of modern web browsers are getting used to not having to type in an entire URL to get to the page they want—most new browsers fill in the shorthand, so you can type in “Torontoist,” for example, and don’t have to worry about the .com suffix. Unless you’re on Rogers, that is. Beginning yesterday [...]

At Friday’s Jays-Yankees game, Alex Rodriguez got hit where it hurts when a pack of Jays fans—one who looks conspicuously like Seann William Scott—teased him with photos of Madonna. (Cynthia Rodriguez had just filed for divorce, her lawyer saying that she was “emotionally cheated” on by her husband with the singer.) Unfortunately, Rodriguez struck back [...]

A day after Google called out Bell for throttling BitTorrent traffic, and a few days before Rogers releases the iPhone in Canada to significant customer dissatisfaction (the latest news is that Apple won’t even be selling iPhones from their own retail stores because of Apple‘s dissatisfaction with Rogers’ pricing plans), Bell and Telus have decided [...]

The second-generation iPhone was unveiled today, and it is (officially, legally, and dear God finally) coming to Canada on July 11 this year. Just over a month ago, with rumours abounding about the new release, Rogers announced that they would be the phone’s exclusive carrier here, but provided no further details as to how they [...]

Now, normally our coverage of anything Rogers is best downed with a tall glass of Haterade, but Toronto’s technophiles and status-hungry business execs have reason to give thanks today to the Evil Empire, for the most anticipated gadget of the last gazillion years is to finally land in our fair city: Apple’s iPhone. In a [...]

Photo by Denmar from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. Canadian telcos are masters at exploiting customer tolerance limits—when you need a mobile device and are locked into a contract with few alternative options, you’re pretty much forced to accept the beatdown levied by one of the three majors. And the carriers benefit greatly by confusing customers, [...]