Hacker News Reader

Comment by edgefield | Hacker News Reader

Having lived in Canada and the US, with telecom plans with providers in both countries, I think Canada’s telecoms take it to a new level. To give you a sense of how distorted the market is, it was cheaper for me to keep my US Verizon wireless plan than to use Rogers, Fido, etc. when I lived in Canada!

View on HN

I do this.

Unlimited (international!) roaming and everything isn't that expensive (Only about 100$) compared to whatever insane amount I'd be paying if I had some ripoff, under 5 gigabyte or whatever pittance data capped Canadian phone plan for no reason. I also maintain a Central American phone plan that doesn't cost me very much either (2$ every 3 months just to keep the number outside of the country and receive SMS/use chat apps basically, but I don't do roaming when out of that region - When in the region, I spend maybe 20$ a month).

Since the Rogers website is down (Great sales strategy!) I can refer anyone curious to a portion of their menu from some image I found; [1] 95$CAD (500MB until you hit overage) + 60$ for 'roam like home' (no mention of data, canadians still use SMS way too widely), and then probably more to up that data cap with no guarantee that applies to roaming? Yeah, no thanks! Oh yeah, the cops just install malware on your shit with reckless abandon, too. [2] I see no reason to consider Canadian nationality as anything but a nice passport at this point.

[1] https://cdn.mobilesyrup.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/roger...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/07/canada-police-...

I've heard they stop your service if your roaming is half of your data plan.

Wow, that's incredibly rude. I've never experienced something like that outside of Canada before.

Like what are you even paying roaming for if they pull stuff like that? Is there any acknowledgement that some of us are actually abroad most of the time?

Telecoms routinely sell people services based on the assumption people won't use them. This gigabit link? The user isn't ever going to saturate it, right? They are pretty much immediately proven wrong and get angry because their infrastructure is over capacity.

That they can get away with this false advertising astounds me to this day.

I've heard something similar but that they'll stop service if you're out of the US for over 6 months.

My Rogers plan is $90 for 65 GB of data, it is unnecessary (average use for me is 4 GB/month), but better than going over or throttled. When I was supporting an MPLS Rogers fibre connection, we had zero downtime in 2.5 years.

I bet you could twist their arm into a better deal if you spend a while complaining on the phone about today.

I do a lot of my work off of a mobile hotspot so I'm not tied to an office or home. I try to make the most of what's paid for and it goes very far.

I think that if you're getting a decent price it's probably just customer retention at that price point. If they're ripping anyone off widely at the prices I saw, it's new customers... Immigrants etc, pretty nasty.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com