No Rogers iPhone for me...

Rogers posted their pricing plans for the iPhone, and it looks like they're not going to stop price gouging for data any time soon. The pricing plans are differentiated by both available daytime minutes as well as allowed data, and there's no option to modify either one to find a package you can be happy with.

The least expensive plan is $60 per month, which gives you 150 minutes and 400MB of data. According to Websiteoptimization.com, the average size of a webpage is 310k with 150k of additional external files (CSS, images, etc). So this gives you about 890 page views per month. Now, I don't know about you, but I average over 100 page views per day, not including refreshes of Google Reader. It's also important to note that the 400MB of data includes emails and attachments. I think that if I averaged out my web and email usage over a typical month, I'd easily hit 1GB if not 2. Now add in Apple's status notification system (in which applications send update data through Apple's servers direct to your phone) and the App store, and you might be in for quite a surprise at the end of the month. For that level of usage, I'm going to have to shell out $115 per month (plus system access fees, and an additional caller ID package), which is almost what I pay for both K and my phones together now. On top of all that, I have to sign a three year contract for the privilege of giving Rogers money. Someone on one of the forums posted the all-in price, and it was near $3000.

I had hoped that the iPhone's emergence in the Canadian market would have pushed some changes to the pricing structures consumers here have to suffer. It appears that this is not the case, and that the providers will continue to charge criminal amounts for data. With luck, the spectrum auctions here will change things and introduce further competition. I guess time will only tell. For now though, there's just no chance I'll give Rogers a single cent towards an iPhone, and I'll continue giving Telus my money.