As predicted, Rogers followed Bell and Telus in beginning to charge their customers for incoming text messages. If you have a text messaging plan, this does not apply, but the majority of people do not have a text plan because they get offered a number through their voice plan (not a text plan).

This is a good time to buy Rogers stock, profits will be up.

Sure, Roger’s has two Canadian “exclusives”, the iPhone and the Blackberry Bold. But recent changes to their pricing and upgrade policies have me rethinking them as the choice for my current smartphone. Not only did they increase prices on all new blackberrys (by as much as $50) but today they increased the time for upgrades from 12 months to 24 months. This is on top of thier new increased fees for cable, internet and wireless service.

Rogers is taking EVERY step possible to squeeze as much revenue as possible from their existing user base. At least we have some choice in the matter. Bell isn’t standing by and has aggressively been promoting both cable and internet service to my building. GlobalLive is holding onto a large chunk of spectrum and itching to get into the wireless service in Canada. We have long memories and won’t forget this cash squeeze from Rogers – we may not leave right away, but when the time comes, we will leave and never look back.

Over the weekend I called Rogers because the Cable TV portion of my bill was way higher than I thought it should be. Turns out a “Speciality TV” package was added to my bill at a cost of $40/month. By removing it I only lost a few channels and none of them I really watch anyways because the VIP package already gave me a lot. Basically the two packages overlapped significantly.

What strikes me as odd is that I didn’t ask for that package to be added. It was added when I had some problems on my account and it was put there for “free” because of the headache I went through from Rogers. Little did I know that there was a term limit to how long it was free for and it quickly turned into a fee package.

So, double check your bills – make sure you’re getting only the services that you want. And be careful when Roger’s offers you something for nothing…

In the past month, as a Rogers Internet customer, you’ve probably noticed that you get a search page instead of an error page when you type in an DNS that is not registered. This reminds me of the Verisign “Site Finder” practice that did a very similar thing. Verisign’s Site Finder was disabled after ICANN told them to stop.

Rogers has had this redirect since July 18th and there doesn’t seem to be an end to the practice. However, there is an alternate DNS that has been made available for people that do not want this practice to continue.

Here are the details:
altdns.rnc.net.cable.rogers.com
64.71.255.202

Rogers is offering a “limited time promotional price offer” for people buying the iPhone or other smartphones. They are offering a $30/month 6gb data plan.

Effective July 11, and as a limited time promotional offer for customers who activate by August 31 on a three year contract, a data-only offering of 6GB of data for $30 per month is being made available that can be added to any in-market voice plan

What’s more is that they are allowing iPhone purchasers to use Rogers plans that are not the crappy iPhone plan.

New Canadian iPhone 3G customers will also have the choice to select from Rogers Wireless’ existing voice and smartphone data plans and/or additional features to best suit their needs, or from Rogers Wireless’ value bundled plans specifically for iPhone 3G. Existing Rogers Wireless customers can keep their current voice service plan and select a separate data plan to meet their needs or choose from other plans after checking their individual upgrade eligibility.

Source: Rogers Press Release

These rumors come from a blog and have been repeated at Boy Genius Report, a phone blog I look at regularly.

It sounds like Apple is cutting back on the stock of iPhones that Rogers will get, and that Rogers dealers are reducing the number of extra staff that were originally going to be used to help out the “iPhone rush” of initial sales. The rumor is that the extraordinarly high priced data plans have caused Apple to rethink how many handsets to allocate to Rogers.

The sad thing is, I think Rogers doesn’t really care how many iPhones it sells. They are happy making piles of money on the highest mobile data rates in the first world. With zero threat of the iPhone coming to another Canadian carrier (iPhone is GSM only) Rogers enjoys a complete lock on it’s availability. Moreover, no preferential data rates for iPhone users are required by Rogers since that would only endanger their current data profitability, something they want to keep as long as possible.

Source: Boy Genius Report and Smithereens Blog

Rogers issued a press release today outlining the plans that go with the iPhone 3G. As expected, they are really expensive compared to the plans in the USA and the other parts of the world. What’s even more surprising that none of the plans come with unlimited data.

$60 gets you 150 minutes + unlimited Evening and Weekend
400 MB of data and 75 text messages

$75 gets you 300 minutes + unlimited Evening and Weekend
750 MB of data and 100 text messages

$100 gets you 600 minutes + unlimited Evening and Weekend
1 GB of data and 200 text messages

$115 gets you 800 minutes + unlimited Evening and Weekend
2 GB of data and 300 text messages

As reported in an earlier post, Rogers has been cutting all the unique shows and attributes of CityTV – leaving what’s remaining to be just another local TV channel.

Today, this continued with the announcement that Ed the Sock is cut. Now, I’m not going to miss Ed, but he definitely was unique. I’m curious as to what is left that will attract any type of viewership away from specialty channels filled with American content.

There’s been speculation on HowardForums (best mobile site ever) from a user who thinks there will be two plans available:

$30 unlimited Consumer Data Plan
$45 Enterprise Data Plan (includes Exchange server support for push email)

If these are indeed the prices, that is an amazing offer by Rogers however we all know how Rogers likes to abuse the term “Unlimited”.

The thread was only created yesterday evening and is already at 15 pages.

When I first moved to Toronto as a summer student for one of the country’s banks, I got to know the city through the eyes of one of the only channels I got using rabbit ears: CityTV. However, the forced sale of CityTV to Rogers has only brought worse and worse news to the station that defined the city.

First they lost their Queen St. location, arguably the heart of the city. However their new Yonge/Dundas location may be closer to the true heart – if it wasn’t located in a concrete wasteland surrounded by advertising. Someone please plant a big tree in that “park”.

Then they cancelled Silverman helps, despite the show’s host wanting to host one more year – his 20th – before he retired. Finally today they announced that “Speaker’s Corner” has also been axed.

What’s left is a TV channel that is just like all the others. The innovative features that made CityTV unique and saw it’s brand spread across Canada (and imitated outside the country) is now just another channel. I’m not surprised Rogers did not understand what they got. Nor am I surprised they moved so quickly to ruin it. They just never understood what it was like to live in the “City”.