There has been a lot of talk about usage-based billing (UBB) in Canada the past couple of weeks, starting when the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (the CRTC) announced that they were going to introduce caps on bandwidth and essentially force internet service providers (ISPs) to charge those who go over the caps. Along with all [...]

There’s an interesting piece by Michael Geist in the Ottawa Citizen about the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)’s policies on Canadian internet service providers, and the effect they have on competition in Canada. One particularly interesting point to note is that Tim Denton, chair of the CRTC, pointed out that newcomer ISP’s, even if [...]

As you can probably guess, I love gadgets. So while Canadian telecom companies like to lock you into 3 year cellular phone contracts, I usually find myself getting tired of the device I have after about a year. So much to my delight, I decided to geta new HTC Diamond (after a great deal of [...]

What a day of tortured joy for Canadian Apple fanatics — Rogers Wireless finally launches the iPhone here and the Rogers website subsequently dies. I’m sure their call centres aren’t faring much better. While I’ve never been much of a Mac/Apple fan myself, I was the proud owner of a 1 gigabyte iPod Shuffle at [...]

As regular readers of this blog probably already know, I’ve never exactly been happy with the Canadian telecommunications industry. They’ve been bilking Canadians out of money unfairly for years now, with little or no government intervention to keep them on the straight and narrow. It appeared that no one in government was willing to take [...]

I’ve been lamenting the state of Canadian telecommunications for quite a while now, but today marks a real significant step backwards for this country’s telecom industry. Rogers, a major Canadian internet service provider, has decided to limit their once-unlimited service to 60 gigabytes per month, and charge users a fee of up to $5 for [...]

I read an article recently in The Globe and Mail (a national Canadian daily newspaper) about a new notification system from Rogers (a major Canadian Internet Service Provider) that lets users know when they are approaching their bandwidth download/upload limit. The article cites various internet and privacy gurus who suggest that this new technology is [...]