And this is only for EDGE phones! $30 for 300MB!? I’m scared to see what 3G will cost… Keep in mind at those speeds 300MB could easily be had in a day or maybe a week, depending on usage.

Good luck with the iPhone Rogers…

What I’m interested in seeing is how Canadians take the idea of Rogers charging them $60+ a month for a very limited amount of services. Odds are, Canadians will still pay, as seen in other instances up and till now for other Data devices. I’m quite interested in how Telus and Bell will take it. I’d rather go for one of there desperate attempts to take some market-share away from the iPhone with much lower pricing. While I’d love an iPhone, if its gonna cost me an arm&leg, I’ll pass.

Also, what happens after the surge of dedicated customers and hype dies off in a couple months? Rogers usually gives pretty good incentives (albeit on a soul-sucking 3 year term) on the first month or so (Vision was a good example) and it slowly becomes of less value (less incentives, higher price) as time goes on. iPhone is just another phone on the market thats been marketed good by the likes of Apple after a year or so. Will Rogers try to continue that hype or go along with “business as usual”? Which in turn will allow Bell and Telus to jack up there rates, which is why the Canadian pricing system never changes. The telcos treat every new thing as a “promotion” so they can market in some customers for a short period of time and collect the real bonus in the long run.

The cellphone is seen as a valueable tool and whose service is worth paying for because often cellular service can be had for less than a landline. Not to mention the convenience of portability.

Considering Rogers past trends and inability to understand that mobile data means more than “email on the go”, their pricing structure will most likely be at the upper end of the scale. At this point, we can say that mobile data is not a greater convenience than, say, landline broadband internet service, and so will not choose to subscribe to it.

An example: the number of friends I have jumping onto the BlackBerry bandwagon is astounding. Out of a group of 10 people I would say 8 have a BlackBerry Pearl or Curve. But out of those 10, only 3 or 4 pay for the $15 email-only plan, and only 1 pays for data. Like the iPhone, the hardware is seen as “cool” and feature-rich. However the service is not.

Rogers will have to seriously reconsider their ways or else Canadians will latch onto competitive ads due to come from Bell and Telus promoting their unlimited smartphone data service at their current rate of $30/month. Just like our friends over the border.

And if I’m completely wrong and Rogers does all of the sudden step into 2008 and begin offering mobile data services at competitive rates, I will only ask “What took so long!?” and “They finally figured it out just because of the iPhone!?”