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”.

An Apple press release made it official today about the availability of the iPhone on Rogers on July 11th. Now Rogers themselves have issued a press release with their handset pricing. However no data plan pricing has been announced.

$199 for the 8gb model (on 3 year contract)
$299 for the 16gb model (on a 3 year contract)

The new iPhone 3G is coming to Rogers on July 11th along with the rest of Apple’s launch partners. This was announced in the following press release by Apple.

As predicted, it’s coming with HSDPA fast mobile data service as well as GPS. Pricing was not announced.

Update: Gizmodo did a great article on what was not upgraded in the iPhone 3G. Here is their list:

• A 32GB model
• A better camera
• More RAM
• MMS
• A2DP Bluetooth for stereo streaming
• A camera on the front for videoconferencing
• Video capabilities
• Turn-by-turn navigation (will come with a 3rd party app, I’m sure)
• The ability to copy and paste

This Monday Apple is making an announcement at the 2008 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Many people are expecting Apple to launch the newest version of the iPhone at the conference – one that includes a 3G antenna that would bring broadband level speeds to a mobile device. 3G phones have been with us for a while, but none with a browser that is as powerful as the webkit-based Safari browser on the iPhone.

In Canada, Rogers has had 3G service available in the Greater Toronto Area for some time. My old phone, and HTC Cavalier, was capable of using the 3G access (specifically HSDPA) to get speeds of over 1 Mbit/s when using the browser. With the April 29 announcement by Ted Rogers that the iPhone was coming to Rogers this year, many believe that Rogers is going to be bringing in the 3G iPhone and announcing service plans for the phone.

Is this going to happen? We have to wait until Monday for Apple to announce the iPhone 3G and then see what Rogers does. Rogers is not known for competitive pricing on handsets or data service plans, so if you want a legit iPhone in Canada, be ready to pay a lot.