

Bell Canada to charge 15 cents per Twitter SMS even with an unlimited plan - ingenium
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/News/Canadian+tweets+cheap/1328869/story.html

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potatolicious
As a Canadian this comes as no surprise to be. Bell and Rogers (basically the
only two telecoms in Canada) have always pulled shenanigans like this against
their customers. Canadian cell phone plan rates are ridiculous, and data even
more so. When I lived in the US I had a ton of minutes and unlimited data for
$50 a month. In Canada I pay this just for a handful of voice minutes.

And this is one of the major reasons why the tech field is constantly failing
in this country. Our government (both parties that matter, anyway) have no
interest in encouraging fair telecommunication prices to drive innovation.

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cperciva
_Our government (both parties that matter, anyway) have no interest in
encouraging fair telecommunication prices to drive innovation._

Well, the high wireless data rates were one of the stated reasons for last
year's spectrum auction -- I don't think any of the companies which bought
spectrum last year have started operating yet, but I'd guess that rates will
come down once they're up and running.

~~~
wmoxam
That could be a long ways off with the expense of building a network and the
difficulty in raising capital these days ...

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mrtron
Bell/Rogers have horrible cell phone pricing.

Before the iPhone came to Canada about 6 months ago, they were charging 30$
per month for 5 megs of data usage. In 2008.

Why? Because Blackberry users here are mostly corporate users that don't pay
their own phone bills, and they were nailing those corps for massive overage
bills on data.

Such scamish companies and they are the only 2 options for most of Canada.

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patrickg-zill
It seems that the bigger the telecom firm, or the greater their level of
incumbency, the more evil they are.

I have seen this as mid-size companies like Broadwing and Telcove got absorbed
by Level3, and the quality of customer service going down while Level3
invented additional charges on set-price contracts out of thin air.

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evdawg
It seems that this article is wrong-- today Twitter confirmed that _there are
no additional fees_. [http://blog.twitter.com/2009/02/bell-mobility-and-
twitterno-...](http://blog.twitter.com/2009/02/bell-mobility-and-twitterno-
extra-fees.html)

~~~
pbrown
The keyword is "incoming":

"Twitter and Bell have agreed that Bell customers on the company's text
messaging bundles will be able to receive unlimited incoming Twitter SMS
messages at no extra charge."

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bonaldi
I don't think it'd be any great loss for Twitter to dump SMS entirely.

Stripping out SMS support is what really allowed it to take off in the UK.
When you think that there's even a chance everybody is getting yr minutae
fired to your phone, it acts as a rate limiter.

~~~
Zev
Tweeting via texting is a big plus for me - I don't have an iPhone/Android
phone with a data plan.

