Today, Rogers has announced its data plans for iPhone 3G. With no surprise they all suck pretty bad.

No Unlimited Data, No Flexible Voice Plan

The iPhone 3G comes with 4 plan. None of them include unlimited data, which is quite dissapointing.

The premium plan, comes at $115 per month with a cap of 2GB and 800 minutes of voice.

To the initial fee, you have to add $15 for the caller ID, $0.50 for 911 services and $6.95 of access fee. With taxes included, you’re going to pay almost $160 per month. More than $3000 at the end of the mandatory 3 years contract.

This is damn expensive!

I don’t care about voice minutes, I don’t use them much. I would rather have picked a smaller voice plan — like AT&T does in the US — in exchange of an unlimited data plan.

The thing is, if the premium plan is for advanced users, then 2GB is an absurd limitation — especially for that price.

A Hard Bill to Swallow

Let’s do some math. At 3MB a song or an app, 2GB gives you 700 downloads each month. Not bad you might say, sure but the iPhone is not only about that, it’s about data streaming. Data streaming is the next step in mobile services and lots of app would make use of it.

Watching a video on the iPhone is about streaming data at 400Kbit per second, so roughtly 50KB per second; this number is also pretty close to streaming Google Maps, playing connected games or even browsing highly dynamic (AJAX) websites.

At this rate, you would burn your 2GB limit of “Internet activity” in about 12 hours. After than you would have to pay 50 cents per MB for the first 60MB and 3 cents per MB thereafter.

The Deadly Sin

I don’t buy the argument of Rogers: “2GB is about reading 1 million emails, it should be enough for everyone.” Bullshit!

I heard that argument before. France Telecom, 10 years ago: “a 36.6K modem should be good enough for everybody browsing the Internet and watching videos online.” Then came Free, a private ISP, who blows up their business in just a couple of years; by offering free Internet access and cheap ADSL.

You know what Rogers, what you’re doing is called greed, and it’s not good for business.

Don’t expect to build a sane relationship with your customers by being dishonest. As soon as a better opportunity shows up, you will lose tons of them.

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