By simple comparison, my bill (on both Rogers and Fido) is easily $600 a month when I travel to the US — and that’s not even using data. An American can get an all-you-can-eat voice and data plan for a fraction of that.

Heck, I even disabled data in the US — every Google Map trip cost me $10. I tried to get Bell’s North America data plan and voice plan on the same phone only to be told I couldn’t: “They’re complementary,” said an unhelpful clerk (right before she moved my number into the Bell network without authorization and took me off the air for a week. Thanks for that.)

In this day of mobile online commerce, I would bet that wireless is a bigger axe to grind, and one that more Canadians can get upset about than broadband. The vast majority of consumers doesn’t understand net neturality, nor care much as long as their Youtube works. Sure, we live in a broadband backwater where great sites are blocked (Pandora and Hulu, I’m looking at you) but that has as much to do with media and copyright issues as networking.

But wireless bills are something we can all get angry about. Even Canada’s so-called “unlimited” plans restrict which sites we can use. The Canadian telcos got fat and lazy on long-distance (for which we were the most lucrative nation of all.) Now they’re shifting the cost burden of their no-longer-competitive organizations onto the backs of captive wireless subscribers.

I’d like to see someone get angry and vocal about that, first.

(and yes, no standout advocate-curmudgeons, though you mention a few great ones. Austin gets fired up well but he’s focused on a different set of problems these days, to his credit! Maybe a coalition of vocal Canadian tech-wonks?)

Seeing as he gets more mainstream media attention than most bloggers and net neutrality activists, I would agree he’s our best choice.

But I don’t think the solution is a single person like Arrington. It wasn’t just him that set things off. It’s the fact that there are so many people who follow Arrington that Comcast didn’t want to risk pissing them off as well.

What we need is a closely tied community of followers. I don’t know what the numbers are for Geist, but I’m guessing they’re not as high as Arrington. If all the bloggers get together to form some sort of outlet for their opinions it will be much easier to start a commotion than hoping just one will set things off.

For Arrington this was Twitter, for Canadians, who knows.

Mark, consider joining forces with Geist and some of your other friends in the biz and maybe together you’ll make enough noise to get the CRTC off their butts.

Each of you writing on your own apparently isn’t doing it.

By the way, I’m saying Comcast figuratively here. We have enough monopolies.