new national carrier

So the federal government overruled the CRTC concerning the foreign ownership of Wind Mobile and Wind might be offering wireles service as soon as Monday in Toronto and Calgary.

Hilariously, Rogers CEO commented that “There’s no question in my mind that Canada cannot support more than three national facilities-based players [...] It’s inconceivable to me”. Hopefully he’s right and that means one of our shitty existing telcos will finally go under. Wind’s CEO also had a great response: “I’m sure somebody told Starbucks that there wasn’t room for more coffee shops”.

Wind also has some pretty funny ads comparing cell phone plans to hot dogs, bike locks, and sidewalks.

Yet more victims of the downturn in business travel | Gulliver | Economist.com. it’s Rogers. cause they bleed you dry on roaming. via amanda.

Rogers to charge customers without text plans for incoming messages. “Canada is always on the cutting edge when it comes to price gouging cell phone customers”. this after announcing support for sending twitter updates. via ram. also, fuck you rogers.

Apple Said to Be in Talks to Sell IPhone for Verizon – NYTimes.com. if they do that, maybe they can also sell them to telus and bell. Also mentions the boost at&t got from the iPhone, half of their new subscribers in the last quarter were iPhone purchasers.

GrandCentral To (Finally) Launch As Google Voice. It’s Very, Very Good. . grand central was pretty cool. too bad i don’t have a US phone number any more.

tomato firmware + teksavvy

I installed the MLPPP variant of the Tomato Firmware on my standard Linksys WRT router to get around Bell’s DSL throttling. Although I do enjoy sticking it to Bell, the added bonus is that the Tomato firmware is quite awesome. I thought three features were really worth mentioning: (1) real-time bandwidth graphing (using SVG of all things) along with daily/monthly bandwidth logs, (2) a channel scanner to see if other local routers are on the same channel, (3) you can define quality-of-service priority for different protocols (skype, torrents, web browsing, etc).

On that note, I thought I’d make a quick review of my DSL provider, TekSavvy. I’m on their residential dry-loop plan (which means I don’t have a phone line). I went with the Premium plan because I’m pretty confident I’ll never go over 200G of data in a month. I have a pretty crappy line coming to my house so my connection maxes out at 4Mb but I don’t really download enough large stuff to benefit from some 8Mb cable connection. It’s also pretty darn cheap: $36/month and I got my modem off a guy on craigslist for only $30. I’ve only had to call tech support once but a real person answers the phone and they were quite helpful. So all and all, I think the service has been pretty good for what I pay. Though the think the best part of using TekSavvy is the sheer joy I feel knowing that I’m not giving Rogers any more money. I can’t wait for the day when another telco has the iPhone; I will gladly pay any cancellation fee to be done with them.

TheStar.com | Media mogul Ted Rogers dead at 75. i can respect a guy who built a blue chip empire but i’ll still curse how large my cell phone bill is. $7 for call display!

reportonbusiness.com: Bell teams with Telus to overhaul wireless network. they’re going to share a GSM overlay. Bell said they’ll have it for Vancouver 2010 so Rogers will have their monopoly for a while still.

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.