[clug-talk] Cell phones and Telus

[Shawn]

There was a recent discussion on cell providers on SlashDot.  The bottom 
line is that in Canada, they all suck - compared to the services 
available outside North America.  There are horror stories for every 
provider, and I personally have mine with Bell.

I shifted from Bell to Rogers for two reasons.
First was my calls were getting dropped on a regular basis.  This was a 
newer phone and I would see calls dropped regularly (3 to 5 times a 
month).  When I called them on it, they would tell me their "records" 
only showed 3 dropped calls in the year.  When a business call possibly 
worth a lot of money was dropped, that was the last straw in this case. 
BTW, the majority of the dropped calls happened within Calgary, and it 
didn't matter if I was stationary or mobile (i.e. driving).

The second reason is more mundane.  I had bought the OpenMoko phone to 
play with.  It was GSM based, and the only GSM provider at that time 
(still?) was Rogers.  So I paid $25 for the sim, signed up on a one year 
contract (they wouldn't just sell me the SIM without a contract, so took 
the smallest I could).  Turns out the OpenMoko's phone capabilities are 
somewhat lacking (volume issues mostly) so I paid full price for another 
phone and dropped in the same SIM with no problems.

This ability to swap SIM cards on the fly is a very convenient feature. 
  Apparently the rest of the world has adopted GSM, and Canada is one of 
the last hold-outs for CDMA phones.  So, if you want to be able to 
travel, I think you'll have more flexibility with a GSM based phone - 
which means Rogers or one of it's child companies.

In terms of pricing and service, I'm not particularly happy with Rogers. 
  I seem to be paying double what my plan is supposed to be - my minute 
usage is a little more than the plan at $0.30/minute.  I've changed 
plans, but need to wait a month or two for things to settle down to the 
new price structure.  I also am getting a lot of dropped calls. 
Especially since coming back from Vegas.  But, I'm reasonably sure this 
is a case of me dropping my phone toooooo many times.  (New phone in the 
near future for me...)

HTH

Shawn

Dick Angus wrote:
> Thanks for the quick responses. That was a lot of good information. I do 
> need some out-of-Canada service so 711 looks to be out. Knowing that 
> many of the others are off-shoots of Bell (I worked for them many 
> decades ago - a fresh young programmer just out of school) I might give 
> them a good look. Maybe their Solo service will work well for us.