Kevin Fair
Rogers Reaming On Roaming
July 9, 2009 at 6:11 pm | Personal | View Comments |
Okay, I know that Rogers isn’t the only company that extorts money from it’s traveling customers with their roaming charges, but they’re going to get my special attention because they have a monopoly on iPhone in Canada and that’s the only reason I’m dealing with them.
I am going to be traveling soon so I decided to check the Rogers website to see what their roaming rates are. Finding information, particularly pricing information, on the rogers.ca takes about as long was waiting on hold to talk to one of their so-called customer service reps. Finding it on the website ended up being hopeless so I Googled it (yes, Googled it, not Binged it). Here’s what I found.
When traveling in the US Rogers customers are subject to the following rates.
SMS Message – $0.60 each
Seems high, but I suppose I can cope.
Local Calls in US – $0.95 per minute
I think I’ll send a text instead.
Incoming Calls – $1.20 per minute
Don’t be offended if I let my calls go to voicemail.
Calls Back to Canada – $1.70 per minute
I love my wife and son, but…
US Data Roaming – $0.03 per Kilobyte
That doesn’t sound like very much does it? Hold on, let’s look at that in Mb. Unless my math is wrong that’s $30 per Mb. Yikes.
Sheesh. I might as well leave my phone at home.
These rates are accessible here.
It’s not that the rates are high that makes me upset. It’s that they are obscenely high. Also, when you sign up for a plan all they talk about is the local minutes, data etc. Many people (including myself in the past when I was with Telus) understand that the rates are higher when roaming, but don’t realize how insanely high they are.
Recently Adam Savage from Mythbusters announced on Twitter (@donttrythis) that he had unknowingly rung up an $11,000 roaming charge from AT&T while traveling in Canada recently. There is something wrong with prices when a person can unknowingly rack up a bill in the thousands.
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Rogers Reaming On Roaming http://bit.ly/rUORy — A Bit More Fair
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Yeah – try Rogers roaming in Brazil and Chile and Uruguay …$3 PER MINUTE.
Great thing about iphone having wifi and skype (if you have a US itunes account)…can call anyone from anywhere for free (or cheap if you skypeout). Wifi is great in Chile (every restaurant has it free)…Brazil you have to wait until you get back to the hotel for free wifi… Uruguay some restaurants have it.
Get your friends and family on skype and lose the home phone (if you still have one). We use skype for work even calling locally because you can see when someone is there, message and drop photos and documents on the skype window and they send to the person you are talking to.
Oh yeah ….and did you notice the “internet tethering” charge on your bill(even though in the contract it says you are allowed to tether) …now at $0 but for how long.
Tethering will be $0 only until the end of this year (Merry Christmas) Rogers will be charging ridiculous sums for it after that point. Keep in mind – any sum for tethering is ridiculous since you’re already paying for the data in your data plan.
Double dipping. How (not) nice.
I was not aware of the tethering until end of the year only. That sucks the big one. I actually signed on to a larger data plan (with a commitment) partly based on the fact that tethering is available for plans 1Gb/mo and up.