spain, rubyfringe, iphone

I’m back from Spain. It was awesome. Barcelona is my new favorite city. Also, the Citroen C2 is amazingly roomy for a tiny car and has an insane turning radius. Hopefully I’ll steal Auriol’s photos soon and you can all see them.

I landed at 9pm on Friday and headed immediately to the opening night event of RubyFringe, Unspace’s punk-rock tech conference. The whole thing was an unmitigated success (in my humble opinion) and I was very glad that everyone I asked seemed to agree. All of the presentations ranged from “awesome” to “best I’ve ever seen”. The food and parties set a new bar for tech conferences (in my humble opinion). Though lots of people helped out, my fellow unspacer Meghann deserves an insane amount of applause for doing such an amazing job organizing and planning the event. Checkout what people are saying about RubyFringe on Twitter here and tons of photos on flickr here.

And now that I’m back, I went out and bought a 16GB iPhone. $90 a month to the man (Ted Rogers). Maybe I should buy like $1000 worth of Rogers stock just so I feel like I’m not getting completely screwed by this GSM monopoly.

RuinedIphone.com | Screwing Canadian iPhone customers since 2008. i agree. but come on people, there’s better things to protest.

Michael Geist - CRTC To Face Net Neutrality Issue as CAIP Demands Bell Cease and Desist Its Throttling Practices. hopefully this works and it seems simple enough. why doesn’t government work like that here?

Coming Soon, Even Faster EDGE Networks - GigaOM. seems nokia has a software solution to double EDGE networks. iPhone users rejoice.

Bell irks ISPs with new throttling policy. man does canadian telco suck ass. via josh.

Deutsche Telekom bringing T-Mobile to Canada in 2009? | The Boy Genius Report. tmobile has been killing me on roaming charges but i’ve always been overly impressed with their customer service.

What if Telus had bought Fido? “it may be a key reason why Canada is the cellphone backwater that it is.” via josh.

Senate Passes Bill to Expand U.S. Spying Powers - New York Times. this bill also gives telco’s immunity for breaking the law and essentially allows warrent-less wiretaps. way to go democrats!

AppleInsider | Rogers unlimited data plan an inroad for iPhone in Canada?. $20 for unlimited data on phones other than blackberrys. that took long enough.

FCC to Probe Comcast Data Discrimination. i am one of these comcast customers who can’t upload via bittorrent.

TheStar.com | Telus considers dumping its `Betamax’ of wireless networks. rumors of a switch from CDMA to GSM. mentions how it wants to get in on the “lucrative business” (read: racket) that is international roaming charges. via jody

The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry. really, wireless web access on any other phone is just ghetto.

Colbert Report - AT&T: The T-1000 of Telecoms. a primer on US telcos.

Complicated Laws = Free Calls techcrunch is reporting about a new site, allfreecalls.net, that’s offering free long distance (available country codes) which you access by calling a number in Iowa. no limits and no catches. what’s insane is that they’re making money through an insane FCC loophole.

sympatico fiber

Bell says they’re launching a “fiber” service in the Montreal area. I’m guessing it’s not all the way to the home so it’s really just “fiber closer to your home”. What I love about the press release is that it essentially promotes rampant piracy…

Optimax, as it’s called, is available in selected areas of Montreal now and is priced at $65 per month for 10 Mpbs or $80 per month for 16 Mbps. Sympatico Optimax includes up to 75 GB of bandwidth usage, or the equivalent of over 15,000 music downloads. Availability and pricing of the service in Toronto will be announced at a later date.

Techdirt: Why Aren’t The Telcos Paying Google For Making Their Network Valuable?. A little while back verizon said that sites like google and msn get a free lunch from carriers because they don’t pay for the traffic. This is a pretty dubious claim even for an industry as stupid as telco, but techdirt goes so far as to argue that telco’s should be paying google.

Why? Well, all that bandwidth the telco’s own is completely useless unless there’s something filling it like compelling content (read: sites like google). The post also makes an interesting point about how verizon already pays for the right to play video content on cell phones. Really, verizon should just be happy that search engines aren’t a cartel like the MPAA/RIAA and that they can serve that content for free.