Canadian mobile phones = extortion & blackmail
Every time I get my phone bill I am shocked by how much they rip you off here in Canada.
Even though US & Canada are essentially the same network (both +1 country code) you still get charged ridiculous roaming charges for using your Canadian phone in the US – $1.20 a minute for an incoming call! And $1.25 a text message.
But it’s not just when you go abroad. Month to month I get charged an additional $30 a month on top of my plan for data. And if you want international text messages they’re extra too? Paper bills? it’ll cost you? Being able to use make cheap calls from 5pm instead of 7pm? That’s extra too.
And I have to pay $3 a month for the privilege of being able to use call forwarding (which I need to be able to use an alternative voicemail service to theirs – which is crap but costs $10!
The worst thing of all though, is that they purposefully surpress incoming caller information (ie the number that is calling you) and don’t display it unless you pay the $10 for voicemail + caller display.
The information is already there (as any European will tell you), they must have actually invented technology to surpress it to extort more money out of you.
I call that blackmail!
And I think I’m going to have to pay it because not knowing who’s calling is a real inconvenience e.g. in meetings – you don’t know if it’s important – so you have to take it every time.
Grr.
Interesting observations. However, I also find it interesting how much you (we) take many of these things being free for granted. The UK is now *the* most competitive in the world, however it wasn’t /that/ long ago that we also paid for most of these.Just to pacify you a little, let me take each point in turn:1) Roaming within same network. Just because Canada has the same country code, it’s certainly not the same network. +1 refers to the continent of North America. Costing more to cross the border is no worse than someone in Luxembourg being hammered every time they drift into Belgium or France.2) Cost when roaming. CAD$1.25 is about 70p/min – roughly the cost of roaming in Europe. Your texts are expensive, but they were in Europe until a couple of years ago when the European Parliament imposed limits.3) $30 (£15) for data. Flat rate data has only *recently* become available in the UK. For MANY years it was charged at a fixed rate of £3/MB – that quickly gets more expensive than your flat rate.4) $3 (£1.50) for call forwarding. BT still charge £2.50 for this.5) International texts cost more. My international texts have always been excluded from my bundle, and cost 3x as much as domestic.6) $10 (£5) for Voicemail. Vodafone and BT used to charge for this too. Eventually they realised they would make more money from the incoming calls all being answered (and so charged) if everyone had voicemail than charging a few people for the service. It’s a business decision.7) Inventing technology to block CallerID. Caller ID has always been present in the network – passing this on to the handset was a feature added to PSTN networks with a view to charging for the information. BT charged for this until just a couple of years ago. The feature has always been an OPTION in the GSM standard with the same intention – a chargeable extra, however most networks didn’t realise they could charge for it.So, it’s not ALL that bad! :) Maybe it’s just more transparent what you’re being charged for, and the other side of the Atlantic has always been 18-24 months behind the UK for phones.