Bell Canada to charge 15 cents per Twitter SMS even with an unlimited plan

As a Canadian this comes as no surprise to be. Bell and Rogers (basically the only two telecoms in Canada) have always pulled shenanigans like this against their customers. Canadian cell phone plan rates are ridiculous, and data even more so. When I lived in the US I had a ton of minutes and unlimited data for $50 a month. In Canada I pay this just for a handful of voice minutes.

And this is one of the major reasons why the tech field is constantly failing in this country. Our government (both parties that matter, anyway) have no interest in encouraging fair telecommunication prices to drive innovation.

Bell/Rogers have horrible cell phone pricing.

Before the iPhone came to Canada about 6 months ago, they were charging 30$ per month for 5 megs of data usage. In 2008.

Why? Because Blackberry users here are mostly corporate users that don't pay their own phone bills, and they were nailing those corps for massive overage bills on data.

Such scamish companies and they are the only 2 options for most of Canada.

It seems that the bigger the telecom firm, or the greater their level of incumbency, the more evil they are.

I have seen this as mid-size companies like Broadwing and Telcove got absorbed by Level3, and the quality of customer service going down while Level3 invented additional charges on set-price contracts out of thin air.

It seems that this article is wrong-- today Twitter confirmed that there are no additional fees. http://blog.twitter.com/2009/02/bell-mobility-and-twitterno-...

I don't think it'd be any great loss for Twitter to dump SMS entirely.

Stripping out SMS support is what really allowed it to take off in the UK. When you think that there's even a chance everybody is getting yr minutae fired to your phone, it acts as a rate limiter.