Smartphone Thoughts: Data Plans From Rogers: Stop The Insanity!

While researching the HTC Touch that Rogers is releasing today, I came upon something that made my jaw drop: the "special" data plan pricing that Rogers is offering their customers.



In case you went blind looking at the sheer ridiculousness of the prices there, let me recap: the cheapest monthly fee is $15/month (keeping in mind $1 Canadian is about $1.05 USD now) and that gets you 2 megabytes. 2 FREAKIN' MEGABYTES. What can you do with 2 MB of data? Perhaps if you stick to short, plain-text email messages, and you browsed WAP sites from 1999, you might be able to live with that. Oh, if you go over, you'll be charged $10 per 1 MB that you use. If you're willing to pony up $60 per month, Rogers will graciously extend to you 30 whole MB of data transfer, and only charge you $7 per 1 MB over that amount. Isn't that nice of them? If you want to get their biggest and best plan, $80 per month will get you a whole 200 MB of data, and if you go over you'll only be charged $5 per 1 MB. Gosh! Golly! At those prices I can maybe even receive a few HTML messages or attachments per day on my Windows Mobile device.