While at the Vista launch even this week, I had a chance to talk with some folks from Bell Mobility, one of Canada’s three cell phone carriers. They suggested that they were looking into raising the 250 meg/month cap on their data plans, but I didn’t get the feeling that things would open up at all at the consumer level.
Interestingly, one of their data sheets said that they were selling the AudioVox PPC6700 phone with wi-fi enabled. That’s a bit of a surprise, since Rogers took the “sell the Nokia e62, which is just like the e61 but doesn’t have wi-fi” route. The Bell website doesn’t say anything about wi-fi for the phone, so it’d be worth asking at a store to be sure, but if it’s true, it might be a sign of a change in attitudes with at least one of the carriers. Or a mistake.
A while back I had a chance to talk with someone from Telus, and he suggested that the reason for the slow spread of the mobile web in Canada had more to do with the lack of cell phone towers. Bell and Telus are able to share theirs, but bandwidth is still limited in some areas, and at $1 million per tower, it’s not likely that excess capacity will boom anytime soon, at least not outside of areas where the VPs have homes and cottages, and I don’t imagine that Bell will announce a special “VP zone” package with better pricing for people who live in those regions…
Post a Comment