Rogers CEO Says 1 GB "More Than Enough" for iPhone

[Marcus Yam]

Rogers Communications CEO Nadir Mohamed says that 1 GB is more than enough for the iPhone user

Rogers CEO Says 1 GB "More Than Enough" for iPhone : Read more

 

[tycfung]

“Our challenge is to ... make it easy for customers to understand one gigabyte is more than enough.”

Wow, this really shows how out of touch Rogers really is. Rogers still sees the iPhone as a regular cell phone for people who will send SMS text message and perhaps view a web page or two. They don't realize that it's a new computing platform with tons of potential, especially for the web.

To put things in perspective for Rogers, a single web page on Tom's hardware weighs in around 800-900k. A page on www.globeandmail.com, gmail and www.theweathernetwork.com is anywhere from 200k to 900k. If we "only needed 1GB" per month, that means we only view 30-40 web pages in a day? Not likely, buddy. Typical users will go through tons of pages, even when simply checking our e-mails on Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo.

To reiterate the advice in this column, get the 6GB/$30 plan before Aug 31. Those who buy the iPhone *after* Aug 31 are going to get seriously "Rogered".

 

[Guest]

Mohammad why try to convince customers that 1 Gigabyte of data is more than enough? If this is really the case then why not offer an unlimited data plan at a reasonable cost.

 

[invlem]

Aren't we supposed to be streaming video and all that jaz with the new iPhone, that's why its got the fun 3G in it right?

I can check crappy websites with my current phone right now... Why would I buy an iPhone just to check my email and browse a few websites. If I have an iPhone I damn well will be streaming audio and video to it, 1GB is laughable.

 

[Guest]

Wow Mohamed, talk about being the most near sighted CEO ever.

First of all, from a strictly marketing and business point of view, if you truly believe in what you are saying, then people won't use 6 GB, so why make comments like this? All you will do is anger customers. If people only use a few hundred MBs why not offer unlimited plans just to appease the customers, and give the appearance of being a nice friendly company? Even if you look at it from a bottom line perspective, comments like this are stupid.


?One is, there?s lots of people who don?t understand if it?s 400 megabytes or six gigabytes ? how many e-mails, Web pages, minutes of YouTube, you name it.?

Thats insulting, yet typical rogers. Nobody cares how many emails that is. Emails are for the most part text, that bandwidth is insignificant compared to video. Saying 400 MB will get you hundreds of thousands of emails is stupid. A typical Youtube video is slightly more than about 2 MB per minute. If you want to see for youself go here:
http/youtube.tdjc.be/

or to one of the dozen other youtube download sites, choose a video and start the download, see the size, compare to the length. 400MB means 200 mins of video, thats about 3 hours and 20 mins. Over a month! Come on! I spend two hours on the bus each day on the bus to work, that means that if there are 20 weekdays, I can watch 10 mins of Youtube every day, and do NOTHING else.


?If you look at what?s happened in the past few years, in both Canada and the U. S., we?ve gone to metered billing because people are recognizing that network capacity becomes an issue,?

It doesn't have to be that way. In canada, there isn't much choice because of crappy competition, but in the US there are lots of unlimited bandwidth ISPs.


?Our challenge is to ... make it easy for customers to understand one gigabyte is more than enough.?

Your only challenge is to gouge customers as best you can. When you have more than 60 000 people disagreeing with you, its pretty hard to stand there throwing numbers around with no backing, and no knowledge of what customers actually want.

 

[Guest]

?Our challenge is to ... make it easy for customers to understand one gigabyte is more than enough.?

Translation: "Our customers don't know how they should be using their mobile devices; we're going to tell them instead." Could Rogers BE any more condescending towards it's own customer base? They don't sound like a business, they sound like a tyrannical government.

Secondly, this comment clearly shows Rogers either doesn't get it, or isn't interested in offering a true mobile experience:

"Clearly, we were thinking mobile Internet is not only about browsing but about e-mail and connection"

Guess, again Mohamed - it's not about e-mail and connection either. Some of the stuff the iPhone allows you to do is stuff like making purchases directly from the iTunes store; i.e. mobile music and video. A single video purchase could easily rack up 700 mb in one download. So, if I'm at the airport and I decide to purchase a movie while I wait for my plane, I use up 70% of my allotted capacity in one sitting?

What about a service like Pandora; where rather than store all your music on the iPhone, you stream it directly to your iPhone over the internet? You could use a gigabyte in a matter of hours.

The problem for a company like Rogers is that companies like Apple and Microsoft are catching up and are now actually starting to deliver applications that will require broadband connections, whether it's TV over IP, full multimedia experiences or direct audio streaming. So their issue isn't with how consumers are using the iPhone; it's with the direction the industry is taking. AT&T and other Telco's cleary understand this and are coming up with reasonable pricing strategies that make these technologies useable for consumers. Rogers, on the other hand, apparently wants to hold on to the "old" vision of the internet where all you download is pages and email; all the while retaining its position of most profitable telecommunications company in the world. Least amount of service, highest cost. Thank you CRTC.

Reality is; if the Canadian government doesn't wake up soon, Canada is going to fall hopelessly behind because of the limiting factor this price gouging is having on the feasibility of new technology. That means a loss of potential jobs and tax revenue (a recent estimate put the loss to the Canadian economy for high telecommunication prices at 52 billion dollars a year). It also means Canada becomes a technological backwater. And who benefits? The shareholders of 1 single company, at the expense of the rest of the country...

 

[Guest]

Typical Rogers - totally screwing the customer from every angle. They are so out of touch with reality. If only we had decent competition in the Canadian telco industry... I'm so sick of over paying for crappy service.

 

[michaelahess]

I think you guys have a possible break down in understanding of bandwidth.

First off, is Cox offering 6GB or 6Gb? It's only a size difference of 8x so no big deal right? I would assume they mean 6Gb but don't feel like reading all the literature.

Second, web page estimates need to be clarified, 900K or 900k, again and 8 fold difference between the two.

One GigaByte of data for web use is actually 8 Gigabits of data, the accepted data rate standard for network capacities. You don't use anything-Bytes to define net sizes, you use Bits.

Anyone want to clarify the nomenclature Rogers is using here?

Any heavy users of data plans want to post their used Kb for a month? Just check your phone call timer for transmit and receive amounts. Which brings up another question, 6Gb(B) of incoming and outgoing combined or just incoming?

This last billing cyle I've used 4167Kb that's four MegaBits not Bytes, 520.875 KB, only half a meg in the world of CD's, disks, hard drive space, etc.

 

[gm0n3y]

@michaelahess

Actually, I've noticed that normally when people talk about network speeds they talk in bits but when they talk about total amount downloaded its almost always referred to in bytes, so I'm assuming they're talking bytes. Not that I agree with this since technically a byte isn't necessarily 8 bits, but its not a big deal as long as people use proper capitalization in their units.

Despite this I would still say that Rogers is the best cell company in Canada. That's not to say that they are a good company, but look at their competition: Telus has terrible pricing and locked phones, and Bell has brutal reception and pricing. Sadly, Rogers has the cheapest plans in Canada.

 

[Guest]

I think the rest of North American wireless companies have unlimited data plans. Actually the trend lately is for the wireless companies to offer everything unlimited, voice, txt data etc etc.. Look at the big telcos down south.. Bell and Telus even offer unlimited data plans. The only wireless company that does not offer them is Rogers. I think Nadir is out of touch with the wireless market, an example of that was the over 60,000 people telling him he came up with the wrong data plans for the iphone. When will Rogers get it? Do they have to fire everyone at the top to get a clean slate?.

Listen to your customers for once?