What are these wireless phone companies thinking?

What are these wireless phone companies thinking?

In Canada, Telus and Bell will start charging customers without a text message plan incoming sms text messages starting August 24th and August 8th respectively while customers with the plan are unaffected. Surprisingly, Rogers hasn’t made that change but it has its own dilema right now with the iPhone’s data plan.

As of now, you can only purchase an iPhone at Rogers or Fido stores and it comes with a 3 year plan. The cheapest data plan is $60CAD + tax for 150 minutes of weekday talk time and 400 megabytes of data. Therefore, you are tied up with paying over $800CAD a year, 3 years just for the plan itself, that is over $2400CAD PLUS the cost of the phone itself! Even though its cheaper than the BlackBerry plan, it is still more expensive than what people are paying or going to pay in the US.

Here are the plans they offer for the iPhone:
http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wirelessproducts/iphone_voice_data_packages

To me, these wireless companies are just a group of vampires sucking as much blood (money) out of us customers aspossible. Unless there is some sort of government regulation or intervention which I doubt, as long as they are the only major wireless providers, we are stuck with this monopoly. Hopefully Rogers will lower the price for the plans when there are less customers buying the iPhone and signing up for them than expected. It is an opportunity for Rogers to stand out from other providers like Telus and Bell if it does, but what I see will happen soon is that it will start charging for incoming sms text messages as well if this goes through for Telus and Bell.

I wonder what other excuses can they come up with later. Maybe something like:
“We will start charging a monthly fee for holding onto your phone number”

Source from TheStar.com:
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/456795

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~ by webtechreview on July 11, 2008.