Re: OT: Cellular telephone service

Scott Wunsch wrote:

>On Tue, 05-Sep-2006 at 15:50:30 -0600, Dylan Griffiths wrote:
>
>
>
>>magic key it's looking for (like Sasktel, Fido, etc). This way they can
>>sell you a phone for way below the MSRP, but ensure that it's pretty
>>useless to you if you want to break the contract and go somewhere else.
>> Given that they usually have "pay us $20 x # months remaining" clauses
>>in the contract, this is a pretty dickish thing to do.
>>
>>
>
>It's not that bad, if they sell the phone far enough below its actual
>price (which they generally do). With GSM, you also have the option to
>decide that you don't like the practice, and go out and buy a phone from
>another source, and simply put your Rogers SIM card in it. (I actually
>did this with my Treo, because I didn't feel that Rogers was giving me
>enough of a discount to be worthwhile buying it from them.)
>
Re swapping of sim cards, if you travel to Europe at all, it's really
worth considering buying an unlocked quadband phone over there. The
prices are similar on average, but the range of phones available (at
least in Britain) is considerably larger than anything Rogers (or anyone
else here) offers, and there are some good deals on price on individual
phones on payg tariffs, so that you need pay no more than GBP10 for the
actual phone service over there. (And of course there's the fact that
you're probably on holiday, so usual budgeting concerns don't apply...)
Of course when you bring it back to Canada there's still the Rogers
start-up fee and the fee for the sim card.
While over there this summer I got a quadband for myself and a triband
for my daughter. I wish I'd got 2 quadbands because Rogers coverage is
so poor on the 1900 band more than a couple of km from the city or the
main arteries, so that their coverage map just isn't true for a European
triband.
Mark
Received on Wed Sep 6 01:00:33 2006