Going to a coffee shop for wireless internet has just become a battle royale á la the Jets and the Sharks. Last week, Starbucks announced it would offer two hours of free Wi-Fi to its Canadian customers—a feature the Americans have had since a new incentive program Starbucks Rewards was offered in April 2008. Bell will also offer unlimited service to its high-speed and WiMAX customers—and in a cruel move, not Bell dial-up customers.......

In yet another significant change of policy following customer outrage, Rogers appears to have changed the rule that prevented existing customers who had changed their phones over the past year from upgrading to an iPhone. According to a forum thread on ehMac.ca (sent to us and confirmed by reader K. Robson), existing Rogers wireless customers can now get iPhones so long as their wireless account has been active for at least three months. Hey, maybe......

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....

Every weekday morning, bright and early, we feature a photo (or two) from a photographer in the Torontoist Flickr Pool. It's our way of giving the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention that they deserve. Ted Lovin' BY BEEMBAG......

The wireless spectrum auction being held by Industry Canada to sell off 300 spectrum licenses has closed, with 40% of the spectrum licenses being set aside for new competitors in the wireless industry and $4.25 billion in revenue going to the Feds. The Financial Post speculates that competition will increase and prices will decrease, and also notes that: "It is widely assumed that all new entrants will lease bandwidth space on Rogers' networks." Ever......

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 (for us), Rogers users started getting a browser hijack for any failed DNS requests, which are usually due to......

Rogers has just announced that they will sell a $30 6 GB data plan for the iPhone that can be added to any voice plan, so long as customers sign up on or before August 31. The Rogers Plus store at 112 Dundas Street East will be open early at 8 a.m. on Friday to sell the phones; they will be sold at other Rogers stores during regular business hours, but will not be sold......

Rogers has unveiled its iPhone 3G plans, and, as anticipated, they're really not that great. No unlimited data plan, mandatory three-year contract, no pie, and the best plan—2 GB data allowance with 800 minutes of talk time and unlimited evenings and weekends—will cost ya a cool $115 a month, not including those nice extra charges Rogers always slaps on. [via Dead Robot.]......

Journalists are no strangers to being sent odd things in the mail to get them excited about new products. For the most part, writers are paid such a pitifully small amount that we’ll take whatever freebies come our way. Free CD? Awesome! Free food? Hells yeah, we’ll go to your restaurant. But Sun Media's technology writer Steve Tilley was less than impressed to receive a pie from Rogers this week to announce the arrival of......

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 would figure out a way to suck all the awesome out of it. The most notable thing about the......

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......

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 curt press release this morning, Rogers announced that a deal had been conclusively inked with Apple and the device......

We wouldn't suggest for a second that the competition between Bell and Rogers has gotten so fierce that Rogers has resorted to cutting its rival's cables to pick up new subscribers. We're sure it was just an accident. An accident that happened often enough to prompt someone to tape this note to a utility box in front of an East York house. Doesn't Rogers call before they dig? Tellingly, Rogers is one of the......

With Rogers' plan to move Citytv, OMNI Television, and the Fan 590 to the southeast corner of Dundas Square, those familiar with the current streetfront studios on Queen Street have wondered if the former Olympic Spirit building will be opened up in a similar way. Though merely an preliminary concept rendering, Rogers and Quadrangle Architects seem to have grand designs for the space, currently dubbed Rogers Television City, as evident in this image supplementing......

Many of us were looking forward to welcoming the Buffalo Bills to Toronto. The eight games they'll play here over the next five years could've been the perfect complement to our existing football diet of live Argonauts games and televised NFL matches. Now that the details have been announced, more than a few of us have been priced out of attending. The majority of tickets average into the $350 per game range, and are only......

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, whether it be via despicable "system access fees" or by giving meaningless, unhelpful names to monthly rate plans, like......

TTC subways twice as costly to build as Madrid's. And they got tapas while they were building it. Rogers increases their fake "system access" fee. Torontoist has learned that this is only the first in a proposed system of additional fees, including an "energy cost of making your phone ring louder" fee, a "remembering that you're paying for additional services" fee, and the obviously necessary "keeping track of all the fees you owe us"......

Apple advertises its 8 GB MP3 player––some device called the "I Pod Mini"––as having enough capacity for 2,000 songs. Rogers, on the other hand, is marketing its 8 GB Sony Ericsson W580i MP3-playing phone as having the capacity for 10,000 songs! 10,000! That's no problem if you like all your music under a minute and a half, in mono, and encoded at an AM radio–quality bitrate. Otherwise, you might be a little disappointed––you know, more......

'Tis the season for gift certificates. Whether you're scratching your head trying to figure out what to give to an impossible recipient or selecting your loved one's favourite store or service, the selection of certificates, cards and vouchers seems unlimited. More than a few local sports woke up on Christmas morning three decades ago to find one of today's passes for the Blue Jays' second campaign as a stocking stuffer. The Jays finished their......

Google has always been known for its clean, lightweight, ad-free search page, but Canada's largest provider of broadband internet is under fire today for messing with it. Toronto-based Rogers has begun testing a controversial technique that allows the media empire to insert its own content into another entity's web page, angering net neutrality proponents. According to a tip passed to L.A.-based technology expert Lauren Weinstein, the system being employed is manufactured by the "in-browser......

The good folks at TiVo have decided that now would be the optimum time to unleash their initially-much-talked-about-but-not-so-much-talked-about-anymore product on Canadians, a mere eight years after its release to the U.S. and U.K. markets. (Way to capitalize on a phenomenon, fellas!) TiVo can be credited––at least according to Canada.com––with "making TV watching less of a laborious task," which is a relative understatement considering how exhausting sitting through commercials can be to the average viewer. Don't......

Photo by Marc Lostracco. Deliberately confusing customers is big business in Canada, and fudging advertised prices with hidden fees is a hallmark of this particular circle of hell. Consumers can activate their cable television within a day, but can't cancel it without paying for the following month. Freestanding "independent" ATMs that are actually owned by big banks charge you an extra $1.50 "convenience" charge on top of what you'd pay at their regular ATM.......

If you're like us, and you attended a Canadian university, you probably watch U.S. college football with a mixture of bemusement and envy—bemusement because you can’t quite fathom how a hundred thousand people could turn up to watch collegiate athletes, envy because you wish you could’ve had that experience at your school. This past Friday, for instance, over 90,000 fans packed Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, Louisiana to watch the Arkansas Razorbacks knock off......

Bell is launching a preemptive strike before the much-drooled-over iPhone lands in Canada. The Star reports that Bell customers with the new HTC Touch phone (pictured right) could get unlimited wireless data for just $7 a month. (Data transferring is necessary to get music, games, television and the web onto your phone.) The Touch is similar to the iPhone in that both substitute a keypad for a touch screen and can run applications, but the......

Sears is threatening to sue Ryerson University after the department store giant dropped $10 million in donations and didn't get a building named after them. Sears claims they were promised top billing and instead only got a crappy logo inside a structure named after some guy who's probably never sold a single pair of wrinkle-free slacks. They're requesting a full building and a commitment from the University that campus hipsters will wear only Sears-bought......

The Toronto Argonauts can turn this Sunday’s Eastern Final into the perfect kickoff for the upcoming Grey Cup festival. If the Argos beat the Winnipeg Blue Bombers to reach the championship game, it'll give a huge boost to the week-long party, also known as “Canada’s national drunk.” Brad Watters, general manager of this year's Grey Cup, says that the team winning the 95th Grey Cup at home "would really turn the town on its......

Few companies inspire the kind of product lust that Apple does, and it's no secret that Mac users can be somewhat evangelical about the company from Cupertino. To many Apple fans in Canada, it's sheer torture that TV shows and movies aren't yet available in the Canadian iTunes Music Store, or that the iPhone is taking so damn long to cross the border. In the United States, the iPhone has been the must-have tech......

The NFL is coming, sort of, to Toronto—and already, rumours of the CFL’s imminent demise are being greatly exaggerated. News that the Buffalo Bills—an erstwhile powerhouse languishing in competitive irrelevance and financial uncertainty—are planning on playing a couple games a year in Toronto isn’t surprising; if anything, what’s surprising is that it hasn’t happened already. Toronto has been courting the NFL for decades, and the Bills, whose long-term survival in Buffalo is in jeopardy,......

So, Molson Canada decided to do a "Twist and Score" promotion and offer the winner an iPhone. Cool, right? There's only one little problem. They said the phone would be available in January on the Rogers Wireless network, which Rogers is denying—they claim there was never a deal with Molson and they refuse to comment on whether Rogers will be the official carrier whenever the iPhone finally comes to Canada. Rogers spokeswoman Odette Coleman basically......

After decades of being situated as an icon of Queen Street West, it has been revealed that Citytv will be moving to a new high-profile location: Dundas Square. Since Rogers Communications announced plans to acquire Citytv, there has been much speculation about what would happen to the legendary Queen Street studios. The solution became the former Olympic Spirit complex at the south-east corner of Dundas Square. Built for $42 million in 2004, the building......