Canada avoids broadband duopolies, keeps line-sharing alive
In a decision that’s most relevant to Eastern Canadians – where telecom competitions actually exists – the CRTC ruled in favour of the little guy. After 4 years of flip-flopping the CRTC ruled that large cable and DSL ISPs such as Bell and Rogers must share their lines with smaller competitors at the same bandwidth speeds offered to their own customers. Unfortunately the ruling isn’t 100% good, the CRTC said it’s still ok to filter traffic and throttle things like p2p. (CBC coverage)

MTS, Bell, Telus forced to rebate customers and service rural communities
Get a load of this convoluted government logic:

The WiFi Debate is not over
So a drama professor named Fancy and a Cold War era microwave expert named Tower walk into a bar…
The head of the drama department at Brock University “…took the unusual step of issuing a news release to warn staff about Wi-Fi dangers.” I guess he’s trying to upstage Health Canada. I really don’t know what else to say about this ridiculous FUD.

Canadians still paying the highest cell phone bills in the world
Long story short: cellcos take in the highest average revenue per user at $55; we have the 5th lowest mobile penetration at around 75%; not only is mobile service expensive, it’s not affordable when compared against GDP per capita. Take a look at the wirelessnorth.ca post for all the fancy graphs and real analysis.

Google buys Toronto-based  game developer
In “me too” news, Google Canada has acquired a Toronto-based cross platform game developer SocialDeck.

Ontario Parents Try To Ban Wi-fi in School: Parents group blames wi-fi for headache and nausea reported by their children. Health Canada rejects their claims, citing science. Teacher’s federation rejects proposal. Chalk one up for science.

iPhone Competition, Galaxy S Comes to Canada: To my knowledge this is the only phone in available on a Canadian carrier capable of running Android 2.2. Bell launched the Vibrant August 6th. Rogers, SaskTel and (possibly) Virgin are following suit…soon.

CRTC Requires ISP’s Financial Data: I’m totally sure exactly what this is about, it almost sounds like the CRTC is trying to get a handle on just how much profit the telecommunication industry is making. In any case, the industry seems ticked and I can get behind legislation that’s going to make those money-grubbing grubber’s lives harder.

Digital Lock Rules “Fundamentally Flawed”: Canadian Library Association is sticking it to the man, well, as much as they can without raising their voice.

Police “Body Cameras” Becoming Common-Place: cameras worn by police officers directly on their person (on an ear clips or helmet) are making there way into forces across the country. Good move, imho.

According to Rogers PR, they will support MMS and tethering with the intention of making the service availble with the June 19th launch. That means these features will not work with current pre-release installs of 3.0. Rogers would neither confirm nor deny whether MMS/tethering would require a more expensive pricing plan.

Also, Rogers will be bringing back their limited time 6GB@$30/mo plan. So if you’re finding yourself using most of your 3G data, you’ll have a chance to upgrade.

Unlike other cellphone carriers, Rogers is allowing customers to “tether” their smartphones, or connect them to a computer and use them as a modem.

This new policy was one of the reasons I decided to jailbreak my iPhone earlier this week.

Finally got around to trying it out tonight. A quick google pulled up a very ominous looking 9 step How To. In actuality there are only 3 things you really have to set up. 1) ad-hoc network on the pc, 2) run ‘socks’ on iPhone, 3) set up SOCKS proxy connection in your browser

First Impressions:

• 3G is fast! Speedtest.net gave me 2742 kb/s down and 246 kb/s up. That was with full bars of reception, during off-peak. This is definitely fast enough for standard browsing and not too bad for file downloads. I’ve gotten worse connections with paid wifi.
• Because it’s a browser based solution, it’s somewhat limiting. I suspect there’s some software available that would hook into a proxy server at on a lower level, it might even be a standard configuration setting in windows. I didn’t look into it.
• Either the socks app stopped working and/or firefox randomly forgot my proxy settings. Over the course of my 15 minute trial, I had to reset firefox’s proxy settings 5 or 6 times.
• Battery drain on the iPhone is high. You probably only have an hour max.

Overall, it’s pretty cool.
That said, I’m not entirely sure where I’d use this. Most of the time the iPhone is going to be as much internet as I need. I might use it at an airport, if I wanted to sync some podcasts before a long flight or something. I may use it if I wanted to work in a wifi-less location. Other than that, it’s a good backup incase the cable ever goes down.

As I mentioned earlier, I think the poor quality of their 3G network might have been one of the main reasons Rogers was so hesitant to offer unlimited data plans. Until now, I don’t think Rogers has been treating their wireless data service as a serious consumer product.

Apps
If it wasn’t for the iTunes App Store I would have jailbroken my iPhone by now. We’re finally starting to see some interesting apps bubble to the top.
Twinkle is great! Twitter + location = pretty genius.
Dynolicious, looks like a pretty intense car performance meter. With the ability to generate, graph and store stats like 0-60, lateral Gs, Horsepower, it’s probably worth the $12.99. I drive a Yaris, so it’s kind of pointless for me. It would be pretty hillarious to take on a plane (GPS and accelerometer still work in flight mode).
Starting to see some good free games as well. I’ve been playing BreakClassic, Moonlight Mahjong Lite and Jawbreaker…Wonder if there’s a minesweeper clone.
The facebook app is still great – I think they came out with a 1.1 release since my first post. You can now view all user data.

[if someone knows how to link to the iTunes Store, please leave a  comment]

Syncing
Ok seriously, why does syncing take over an hour?!
When iTunes does it’s once a day iPhone Backup it takes me at least an hour and a half to sync. And I can’t seem to stop the backup process.

It begins:

Dear Ryan Nerdorf,

Thank you for your correspondence dated June 30, 2008 regarding Rogers Communications Inc. (“Rogers”).

“Nerdorf!” What a classic typo. They must have been getting a lot of complains from nerds like me!

Here’s the meat of the response:

It is the Bureau’s view that Rogers does not hold a dominant position in the market for mobile wireless telephony services in Canada.  Rogers is in direct competition with two other major wireless providers, in addition to a number of smaller carriers, all of whom offer handsets that are functional substitutes for the iPhone.  Moreover, Rogers’ recently-announced pricing plans for the iPhone do not constitute an anti-competitive act as these pricing plans do not have an intended negative effect on a competitor that is predatory, disciplinary or exclusionary.  Rather, they reflect an attempt by Rogers to market a product consumers find desirable and set prices accordingly.  This may ultimately be disciplined by competitor responses, and/or by consumers rejecting such a strategy.  In either case, market forces will determine if these prices can be sustained.

Data Usage:

Like every other nerd in the country, I was extremely disappointed and angry after Rogers released their initial price plans. My angry rantings even made Letter of The Day in the Winnipeg Free Press! The main point of contention was complete lack of an unlimited data plan, and egregiously overpriced data buckets (with 300MB/mo going for $30. ie. $100/GB).

Once Rogers Caved to public outcry I was back onboard.

So anyways, how much data have I actually used so far? According to the iPhones internal usage stats. I’ve sent 2MB and received 36.6MB over the celluar network, for a total of 38.6MB or 9.65MB/day. This puts me on track to use 289.5MB this month. Puting me under the original 300MB that we all found so offensive. Go figure. Even though I’m using less data I had thought, I like not having to worry about going over my limit.

Apps&GPS:

The apps make the iPhone. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to use another phone that doesn’t have an open-ish application platform.

My top 3 apps are probably facebook, twitterific and mobile flickr. It’s really cool to be able to take a picture from my phone and directly upload them to the web from my phone, inside the same interface. Jott and Evernote seem cool, but I haven’t had a reason to use them yet.

The fact that the apps know exactly where you are (down to 10meters!) has so much potential. I don’t know exactly what it might be, but there’s a killer app lurking in the shadows. That said, I have been a little underwhelmed by the location awareness. It’s just not quite fully … realized, like, “ok. I can see photos taken near by, so what…” Aside from that there are two other problems a) most of the data populating these apps is US-centric, so it’s completely useless to me; b) the attempts at location aware social networking depend on a certain threshold of users before they become interesting – because these apps are a niche within a niche, I don’t really see them taking off.

Bugs:

If the iPhone was a Microsoft product the blogs would be full of hate. I’ve come across a couple of major bugs so far! Namely:

• GPS stops working for no apparent reason. In the “maps” application the GPS locator just hangs and other apps are unable to pull GPS data – depending on how well the 3rd party app is written, this bug might or might not cause that app to crash. Though I can still continue to use all other features of the phone, if I want to use GPS again I have to reset it.
• Crashing! Apps – including official apple apps like Safari – just crash, randomly, for no apparent reason!
• Freezing! Yup, the phone has frozen on my once or twice.

The bugs haven’t been bad enough to frustrate me…yet. They’re more of a minor discomfort. And I’m pretty confident that Apple will push a firmware update soon.

Conclusion:

At the end of the day the iPhone is the nicest phone I’ve ever had. It’s definately worth the $200. Whether it’s worth the data plan remains to be seen.

I wonder what your July 11th announcement could be. Dorks.

Above is a screenshot of Roger’s latest mobile internet plan for blackberries.

“1.5MB of data – enough for tons of picture uploads and profile updates”

Um Rogers, I hate to break it to you, but most of my pictures are over 2MB.

If you mouse-over the “legal” fine print it explains the data overages, “$10/MB for the first 5MB, $5/MB for the next 5MB, $1/MB for the next 10MB and $0.50/MB for remaining overages.” This means uploading 3x2MB pictures is going to cost me approximately $45. Really Rogers?! Really?
For comparison, transferring 3x2MB pictures through a service like amazon’s S3 would cost about $0.00035. There is no way in hell that Rogers is paying over 100,000x more than amazon to maintain their infrastructure!