Shaw Seeks a Piece of the CanWest Pie
Can’t say I didn’t see this one coming…
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Shaw+Cable+Canwest+shares/2555248/story.html
WIND is Here!
Well the long wait is finally over. After some very dramatic overruling of the CRTC by Tony Clement, WIND is now in the market and has launched their products. The prices and concepts are impressive as expected, but the service of course is less than inspiring: for now.
Right now WIND is operating in a”WIND HOME Zone” type of billing structure, and for good reason. They’ve setup their towers in Calgary and Toronto and can charge what they need to in those areas, but when it comes to covering customers in areas outside those cities, they have to rely on (what seems like) the Belus network to provide “AWAY” Coverage as they call it. Obviously TELUS isn’t going to be giving them a stellar deal for those borrowed minutes, but as WIND grows, that will surely change.
Today is not revolutionary. WIND is truly in its infancy and is by no means offering a seamless coast-to-coast coverage solution that Belusrog offers. That being said, they are a beacon of hope of the things to come, whether it be from a nationwide WIND that will come in the next 6-18 months, or from the big three who are being pulled down from their thrones and forced to compete for once. No matter what it is, there’s no denying that this is game changing:
- No post/prepaid discrimination – no need for credit to have Data in Canada!
- No contracts
- No charge caller ID
- No charge incoming texts
- No need to pay for voice time all you really want is Data
- No long distance charge for calling the Airport from the City (Province-wide calling, not just “local” if that even means anything anymore)
On AWS…
I’ve been trying to find a simple answer to the question “What is AWS?” and in visiting WIND’s store I think it became clear to me: AWS or Advanced Wireless System Services is just a different bank of wireless frequencies that UMTS or GSM can operate on. In the specifications for their phones, WIND describes it as either “AWS UMTS” or “AWS GSM.” I assume this means that these phones CAN use older generation non-AWS UMTS/GSM standards, but not vice versa, which explains why, for example, the iPhone cannot be used on WIND at this time.
As a future iPhone customer, this is discouraging for now, but as AWS becomes more widely adopted across the world, Apple will likely adopt it moving forward. At that point, it will be technically feasible to get the iPhone on WIND, and that’s all that counts for me. Until Apple releases an AWS iPhone, WIND will keep doing what it does best right now, and that’s drive down costs of competition to make the iPhone plans more reasonable.
Some Links
- WIND Mobile Voice Plans
- WIND Mobile Handsets
- Globe & Mail Coverage Note: They claim Rogers offers the roaming, not Belus. Also, scroll down to see a nice comparison for the BlackBerry 9700 across providers. Although it doesn’t really do justice to show just how much you’re getting for the money you’re paying.
A Brief Windows 7 Review
Overview
This evening I decided to whip out my Evaluation Copy of Windows 7 RC that I downloaded a while back. Considering Windows 7 is now released to the public, I suppose it’s time to post a few thoughts on it.
When I first tried it out a few months ago I was quite impressed with the responsiveness of it. The installation was quick, startup and shutdown was no-nonsense, and the UI seemed to be far more refined than Vistas. Most of this review will be in screenshots, but I do want to primordially emphasize that Windows 7 is definitely a step in the right direction for Microsoft. I think they are finally starting to understand that its all about being implicit, not explicit. It is about putting interface elements where they should be, not paragraphs of text telling the user where they are, that is, where they shouldn’t be.
Windows 7 cleans a lot of the pitfalls of Vista in this area. I think my frustrations with Vista source from the fact that they moved everything around in the Operating System. Suddenly I was stuck when I needed to find an IP address or get to the device manager, or even just to get to My Computer. Everything was renamed and hidden in menus and it was impossible to find what you needed. Windows 7 on the other hand, is just like Vista in that it is the same underlying technology, More
New Apple Products Today
New Apple products came out this morning. Here’s an overview of the updates, and some of my thoughts.
More Cell Phone Plan Analysis
After writing yesterday’s report, I woke up in the morning and took another look at TELUS’ fine print. Sure enough, it turned out that Picture & Video messaging is NOT included for free with My5 people. At first this seemed like a big deal, but then I realized that the question that needs to be answered is:
Suppose I send a picture or video message to a friend on the My5 list. Since I have 250 “Anything” messages, does this mean TELUS will just deduct that as a used message out of the 250, or try and charge me extra because I do not get free Picture/Video messaging to those 5 people?
Of course I would need to find this out first, and I don’t think it’s fair to assume either way. More
Latest Cell Phone Plan Analysis
Finding a new and better cell phone plan has been a very long-time activity for me. While wandering around WalMart I picked up brochures from EVERY provider and try to make sense of it all. They seem to be offering some improved plans for prepaid (Such as My5 and other unlimited options for texting) that were previously unavailable. Even TELUS, which has been notorious for offering their excessively simplistic prepaid plans has gotten on the band wagon of offering some prepaid auto-deducting options.
So let’s start out with what I’m getting in my current plan. With my grandfathered solomobile plan, I get the following:
- 30c a minute anytime
- 15c a minute evening and weekends
- Unlimited incoming/outgoing text messages
- Unlimited mobile browser
- Caller ID
- Voicemail
- $1/day 10-4™ Service (Never used)
Here’s a table of the average amount of money I spend per month. More
Introduction (Travel Notes – Part 1)
At different times in my life I’ve taken the time to write out my thoughts in some form. On ocassion I’ll go back to them and reread them, but most of the time it’s simply a method of organizing those thoughts in some way. Literary Catharsis, right?
This series of blog posts on my travels through the Western United States isn’t intended to be any sort of useful information. It gets to the heart of what blogging is about: a log for the web. A log of where I’ve been and how this has shaped my thoughts, with little to do with anyone else, but the thrill of knowing that it’s there, for public reference.
I will try my best to include some pretty illustrations in Google Earth snapshot form, along withs some photos, but this is mostly just an exploration of the various ideas that came to me while traveling about the United States. This isn’t my first trip to the US by any means, but it is certainly one of the longest and most elaborate. When I was about 8 I took a trip with my grandparents in their RV through many of the same destinations. Ten years later, it’s a different experience however. Even though I ended up eating fast food way too often like I did back then, I really understand some key difference between American and Canadian culture.
Certainly I have a bias being Canadian, but I don’t intend this to be a critism of the United States as much as an examination of what it means to me to be Canadian in contrast. Often times I feel like Canada is too “americanized”, which I still feel is true, but at the same time I now know that we’re far from ever being the same countries.
These are my thoughts.
New Theme!
I’m looking at redoing the site again this summer. It’s been a while since I’ve totally redone the look, and I’d also like to incorporate some of my other spin-off’s like jolevideo and duck podcast.
The gallery needs to be further integrated with Lightroom so that I don’t lose motivation to actually POST photos, and it’s probably time to provide a bit more information about myself considering I put jole.ca on all my business stuff now!
I’ve learned a lot about WordPress in the past years so I’m hoping to integrate some tricks like image attachment to make this blog a bit more interesting! Have fun!