Competition for the Canadian Cell phone... finally

Next year Canada will hold an auction for 105 MHz of the wireless spectrum, and 40 MHz of it will be reserved for "new entrants", opening the floodgates of competition.

All I can say is... it's about time.

In addition to this, regulators will force existing networks to share their towers, allow roaming at commercial rates, and other consumer-friendly bonuses.

This blogger has ranted against the Canadian cell-phone establishment on a few occasions. What is interesting to see, is how this auction compares to the upcoming US spectrum bid.

In the US auction, Google is offering to bid on the spectrum simply because they want to open it up to competition (because the more people that use data on cell phones, the more mobile search services it can offer). As a condition to bid, Google tried to push the US government to adopt a number of consumer-friendly regulations for the auction.

The government decided to adopt... "a few" of the measures.

Meanwhile in Canada, the regulators a diving in head first, pushing rules that are way beyond even what Google was trying to push the US to do.

Of course, the environment in Canada is different in the US. While competition in the US among Telecoms is scarce, competition in Canada is non-existent.

With only 3 oligopolistic bedfellows (Rogers, Bell, Telus), consumers are paying the price. The regulators had to do something.

And indeed they have done something. Let the war for consumer loyalty based on service value instead of penalties begin!

Stéphane Dion slashes children... according to the Globe & Mail

I fell off my chair laughing when I saw a headline in the Globe and Mail today:

Liberal Leader says his government would slash the number of children living below the poverty line over five years.

Read it the wrong way and it sounds REALLY messed up.

Why is Stephene Dion slashing children? Why pick on just the poor ones? And why is he going to do it for 5 years!?

What a big mean-ee.

Rogers, Bell, Telus snub Canadians... again.

Yesterday Google announced that they are releasing an open source operating system (sort of) for mobile handsets, called "Android". They are partnering with over 50 handset makers and service providers across the Globe. The system will be open source, making it easy for developers to work with.

The objective of the project is to make the cell phone internet market more "open", kind of like the way it doesn't matter whether you use a Compaq or a Mac to view the web. Currently service providers in North America are HIGHLY restrictive of what they let cell phone users put on their devices. They also try to control all of the data content (ex. Rogers provides music streaming to your and nobody else if you own a Rogers phone. If done right, this could be very good for consumers.

Not surprisingly, all the Canadian Cell phone providers turned down this partnership opportunity with Google. In Canada we still don't have the iPhone, and once again the Canadian Telcos are demonstrating their monopolistic anti-consumer practices by turning down Google's Android.

Fall photos on the map

I FINALLY got out and did a fall photo shoot last weekend. I use Picassa 2 to do most of my web editing, mainly because it's quick and easy.



I was playing around with the "Web Albums" part of Picassa, and found a really neat new feature, you can post your photos on a map! So, I tried it with my fall shots, take a look here. This would be a great way to keep track of vacation photos.