Corvus Consulting

If you’ve heard much about the iPhone lately, you’ve heard about the fracas over the rates announced by Rogers and its subsidiary Fido, the 3G model’s exclusive Canadian carriers.

iPhone Fever, Canadian Style

Rogers is under heavy fire for lacking an unlimited data option, the long 3-year contract, and the general weighting of other access levels like daytime minutes and text messages compared with price. The packages are lackluster, especially compared with AT&T who carries the iPhone for our neighbours in the US. Carriers worldwide vary widely in the price of the device and contract terms; they’re all over the map, as it were (love those puns). However you compare it, Rogers is on the expensive end, and how.

Everyone loves a summer pile-on, and a pile-on it has been. As the weather warmed up in June, a protest petition launched in angry response to the Rogers’ plan announcements. www.ruinediphone.com is at an impressive 60,000+ signatures worth of blowback as of writing, after just a few weeks. Comments across the web are predictably heated, with forced sex acts the de-facto metaphor of choice for voicing dissatisfaction with Rogers iPhone rates.

Coverage of the petition tore through blogs, newspapers and evening news speedily, morphing quickly into a declaration of Resistance!, or boycott, from the Vancouver Sun, and a friend of mine has even explored a class action suit. Until yesterday, Rogers had barely responded, aside from minimal and unmoving remarks; the price is the price, along with all the little fees, of course, like $7 for ‘system access’, and another $7for call display, and so on. No brand looks good when nickle-and-diming its customers, but that’s another post. Probably another blog, too.

Temperatures rose ever higher, just days from launch, and it all boiled over early this week with rumors of Apple choking iPhone shipments to Rogers. No doubt, readers sang, the furious lash of St. Steve Jobs, smiting Rogers over the disastrous pre-launch publicity they’d adeptly fostered in merely two weeks. Late to the party and three sheets to the wind, TechCrunch stumbled into the scene with speculation that Apple had pulled the launch out of their Canadian retail stores. Exhibit A: a page on the Apple site that showed only Rogers and Fido as iPhone vendors come July 11. No Canadian Apple retail stores would carry it.

ZOMG! Giant snub! Diabolically laid out in plain sight on a page that hasn’t changed since being posted about a week after WWDC! Apple stores in other international markets are following the same protocol, so this isn’t news, but it is tabloid blogging for you. Yes, a hot and sweaty pile-on it has been.

To their credit, Rogers mustered a half-hearted response yesterday: a promotional plan for early adopters offering 6GB a month for $30, combined with any voice plan. Not a bad concession, but not great, either. So on the morning of the day before launch, some conclusions:

• People like to complain.
• Tech blogs and those who repeat them don’t do much in the way of verification and analysis.
• Rogers has all but completely fumbled the Canadian launch of the iPhone.
• And… I’ll be getting one.

Enter, the Contrarian

Though Rogers could and should have done better, the plans do work for me, and will for a good number of people even if July 11 doesn’t turn out to be a big deal in Canada. While it’s been fun to run contrary in comment threads where most posters are just taking kicks at Rogers, there are serious reasons why the Rogers plans aren’t as bad as they seem.

Firstly, I have to think about where Rogers is coming from with these plans. They’re known for maniacally high data rates, and these contracts do bring those prices down. Barring some fantastic eye-opening event, like a Freaky Friday body-switch with between a Rogers exec and, say, Michael Geist, we should expect only small and cautious steps into the world of lower priced wireless data provisioning.

The more important aspect of where Rogers is coming from is that they never used to allow wifi to co-exist with cellular data access on their networks. Mobile providers have traditionally viewed wifi as an insatiable cannibal of their premium-priced, slower cell networks. Something that Apple doesn’t get enough credit for is making wifi so integral to the iPhone and getting carrier agreement in the same package.

It’s also quite informative to ask how much data people actually consume. Like any good blogger, I’ve used Google to dig up reports of how much data people actually consume, and found them quite out of line with what people think they need, which is unlimited data:

• From Apple support forums, we find people reporting 600Mb/month as the higher end.
• John Biehler, an expert on iPhone in the Canadian market, finds his use comes in around 500-600MB.
• Over at Ars Technical, a geek haven, the average iPhone data consumption is around 300MB/month.
• Macenstein has used just over a gig in 8 months!.
• And from the UK, we don’t see much different even though some customers lack unlimited data plans.

How Do You Like Your Data, Guv?

It’s also informative to dig into how the iPhone actually manages itself when accessing data. Apple puts the experience they design for above all else. Most companies just say they do that, but Apple walks the talk like nobody else. Understanding the sensitivity of carriers to network capacity, and the need to protect customers from unexpected charges, they’ve made iPhone’s heaviest data uses wifi-only: the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store. The Application Store will work over either network, which causes concern, but not enough to panic. Moreoever, system preferences allow manual control of cellular data access, and where both types of network are available, wifi access is automatically used without interruption. It’s all in the manual, one of many updated just today at http://support.apple.com/manuals/#iphone.

From this point, a 1GB plan doesn’t sound that bad, and the 6x multiplier for early adopters is pretty alright. While many focus their dissatisfaction with the lack of an unlimited plan miss the point of how much data capacity they actually need, Rogers aggressively misses the point of what an unlimited plan actually means to the overall iPhone experience. Unlimited means never having to think twice about using the device. Even with all my bluster about 1 and 6GB plans being adequate for all but the heaviest users, I’d still rather not have to ever think about it, even a bit. Rogers could have deflected a lot of the fire by talking up wifi, but they’ve been unable to entirely overcome that fear and loathing. We should encourage them to fully embrace wifi as the thing that makes unlimited data plans possible.

Bottom Line

From the amount of fanboy posting I’ve done here about a device not even available in Canada over the past year, it’s clear the iPhone is something I’ve been waiting for. My plan has long been to drop my land line for a mobile that can function comfortably as my only phone, and it arrives tomorrow. As I drop my land line with Telus and go iPhone-only, my total telecom spending will be about $25 more than it is now. Considering what I’m getting for that extra $25, I think it’s money well-spent.

Maybe I’m a sucker, but I expect to be a happy one which counts for something. And, while Rogers/Fido have botched almost every aspect of the launch so far, they’re trying to do better. I’m seeing enough to meet them a little more than half-way, and it’ll be interesting to see how much of the protest in anticipation sustains after launch.