Rogers – Robber Barons Never Had It So Good

It’s been a while since I had a good rant on Rogers … and my latest bill has me shaking my head. I was in the USA for a while recently and I used my phone sporadically … I used 5 minutes of airtime and sent 12 messages in total.

So what should that cost me? Pretty close to zilch, going by the value of what I used.

But no so with Rogers … the air time is almost tolerable at $7.80 for the 5 minutes … basically $1.56 per minute. Robbery, but the kind that won’t upset you unless you use your phone for real. Of course, why carry a phone if it might cripple you financially to use it? I don’t know the answer … perhaps Rogers does. Somewhere down in its department of ruination or wherever it is that they hatch their roaming prices.

But the real kicker is the text messaging. (I won’t even bother with Data Roaming, as it will send you to the poor house faster than you can shake your head.)

So what do we see? Yes … $0.75 per message. Not bad if you don’t have a conversation … that could quickly cost you 50 bucks. But think about it in terms of the actual data you are sending over the network. I average 50 bytes per message at best. So now we’re at 600 bytes for $9. That’s how much per megabyte? Let’s see … about $15,000 … and per gigabyte that adds up to, and I am not kidding … 15 million dollars :-)

That’s Dr. Evil territory … but wait, this gets much funnier.

Say you have a TB of data you want to send. Bear with me … I’m just showing you how ludicrous their charges are on a per unit basis …

You could dump the data to a 1TB hard drive, which can be had for under $100 anywhere these days. So … $100 plus, say, $100 overnight almost anywhere in the world. $200 to send 1TB of data anywhere by tomorrow.

If you were to pay Rogers their text messaging prices for that same data, and let’s be generous and fill each text message to the maximum 160 characters … you would spend … wait for it …. it’s really, really amazing …

$4.7 BILLION

Ok … that’s a bit unrealistic … but do you see how simply outrageous the cost of transmitting such a chicken-sh*t sized message is by Rogers’ roaming prices? It’s beyond ridiculous …

Now … let’s pretend that was totally unfair, although they really do charge that much …

Instead, let’s look at the cheapest data roaming method … which will be a one time fee of $60 which includes 75MB followed by $0.80 per MB after that. That should come out a lot cheaper. And it does. It is also realistic, since it is the only way to send lots of data from your phone without hitting a wi-fi location …

So … 1TB sent via this method from my phone using data roaming comes to …

$800 THOUSAND

Now *that’s* cheap!

Shaking my head …