Here's a quick observation for Koodo subscribers about their 3G vs. 4G service. I don't know why I didn't think of looking into this sooner; both my girlfriend and I use Android on Koodo—me a Nexus 5 with LTE and her a non-LTE hand-me-down Nexus 4. While having lunch the other day it suddenly occurred to me: We should compare data speeds.

The results were closer than you might think. ...

If you're reading this on the front page then you'll see four comments immediately below this post, all by forums user pjw918. But if you visit the Canadian Wireless Industry Discussion you'll see the reverse—I'm actually tailgating this thread in order to bring more attention to it, particularly for fellow Canadians. Because it's pretty scary stuff.

This time last month I wrote about an episode of Jesse Brown's CANADALAND Podcast, wherein Globe and Mail reporter Colin Freeze details how CSEC, our intelligence signals gathering agency, games the media. Long story short, when CSEC makes their surveillance of Canadians so deliberately opaque it's hard to figure out what's going on.

But now, thanks to Professor Michael Geist, we know at least a little more about what's going on. ...

The Internet is the Internet, whether accessed on a mobile phone, tablet, or desktop PC. And the Internet, it seems, is in trouble.

When we last left this story in January, a U.S. Court of Appeals had just struck down the FCC's Open Internet Order—at least the part about common carrier legislation for that country's broadband providers. Now, according to The Wall Street Journal—and other sources not behind a paywall—a new draft of the Open Internet Order circulating within the FCC could end net neutrality as we know it.

Here's how. ...

I spent Easter weekend with my better half in New York City, with mobile connectivity for the both of us provided by Roam Mobility.

It's not the only option for travellers to the USA, but it seemed the best-suited for us. We're both on Koodo monthly plans here in Canada, so neither Rogers' 50MB data roaming package for $7.99/day nor WIND's new $39/month plan with US data roaming included would do. And since I'm not really on-board with KnowRoaming attaching a parasitic host to our SIM cards, Roam Mobility got the nod.

$3.95 CAD per day for 100—wait, 300 MB of data seemed reasonable enough. ...

The other week, Bell announced that they were first to deploy their newly bought 700Mhz spectrum in Upper Hamilton. Steve Punter, HC - No "i" and myself drove to Hamilton to check it out and indeed, Bell had 700Mhz running though it was only on a handful of towers and not every single tower.

We learned a few things. First off, Bell only owns a 6Mhz paired channel (effectively 5Mhz) of spectrum in that market which they can use to deploy LTE. What this means is that the maximum speed on that band is 37.5Mbps. Just to compare, Bell uses a 10Mhz channel on AWS (Band 4) which is capable of speeds of up to 75Mbps while they use a juicy 20Mhz channel on 2600Mhz (Band 7) which can go up to 150Mbs. So, their 700Mhz is never going to be as fast as the rest of their spectrum.

Secondly, since 700Mhz was only running on a fraction of Bell’s towers, their deployment is probably more so that Bell can say that they were first to do it or “Yes we have it”.

Not long after Bell’s announcement, Rogers announced that they also deployed 700Mhz and in bigger markets; Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary. Rogers also reminded us that they own 2x the amount of 700Mhz spectrum that the competition has. Does that mean it’s twice as fast? ...

Just got an interesting PDF outlining how Bell and their network partners are going to be shutting down their CDMA networks. Basically they're shutting down EVDO first (probably since it uses more bandwidth) followed by 1x later.

Basically Jan 1st 2017 is the date when it all ends.

Anyone still using an EVDO device?


...

With Bell announcing that they had begun to roll out 700Mhz LTE (band 17) in Upper Hamilton, myself, HC no 'i' and Steve Punter decided to go to Upper Hamilton to figure out how extensive the roll out is. We took along a Samsung Galaxy S4 with a Bell SIM card. We also brought along a Galaxy S4 with a TELUS SIM to figure out if TELUS is allowed on Bell's 700Mhz.

We hunted the 700Mhz towers using Steve's very cool LTE Widget (not available on the Google Playstore but you can ask him for it).
...

I'm a happy Nexus 5 owner, yet here I am talking myself into a Samsung...?

I put the blame squarely on my carrier; Koodo, it seems, has a better than average lineup of competitively-priced handsets. Virgin Mobile may have undercut them by a penny on the Moto G, but Koodo still has the best unsubsidized price I've seen for the BlackBerry Q5.

And there's one handset in Koodo's current lineup that in my opinion is the best bargain of all: Samsung's Galaxy Note II, for only $350 outright. ...

I'm a little more hopeful about the future of mobile wallets in this country, and specifically the "tap and pay" functionality, as of late.

The banks and credit card companies are as clueless as ever, colluding with carriers to produce proprietary NFC-enabled SIM cards—in blatant disregard for any near field communication technology already present on their customers' phones. And such "solutions" are nowhere near as popular (or elegant) as the humble Starbucks app, still the reigning champion of mobile wallets in North America.

Toronto-based SmoothPay is a promising up-and-comer (albeit in a very small area of service), and now Mobile Syrup reports that a bigger player is coming to town: PayPal. ...

A notification appeared on my phone yesterday from Snoobe, the app I installed last week to monitor my usage and suggest a better plan. Now that it had been running for a few days it had gathered enough information to estimate a monthly data bucket for me.

Imagine my surprise when that data bucket was pegged at a whopping 10.4 GB!



Sure enough, my data usage shows that halfway through my billing cycle I'm already at the threshold of my 4 GB allotment for the entire month. I was in the midst of an experiment, but it looks like I got my results early. ...

Your government is spying on you. Your mobile carrier is spying on you as well. If you live in the United States this is not news—what I mean is, citizens of the U.S. have known about government spying for quite some time. Here in Canada we now know, thanks also to leaks by Edward Snowden, that our spy agency CSEC has—at the very least—colluded with the NSA and snooped on travellers at a major Canadian airport.

Yet Canadians don't seem to care much. The Globe and Mail reported that the revelations have been largely greeted with yawns. Why is that?

It's not you, it's media.

That's the premise of the latest CANADALAND podcast from Jesse Brown. It's probably the best half hour-plus of high-level discussion on government spying that I've heard to date, and it's particularly insightful for mobile phone users. If the few choice quotes that follow get you to have a listen then I'll consider this plug a success. ...

The big story for mobile in Canada this week was carrier price hikes. In case you missed it, check here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. I think you get the idea.

In the midst of this hostile environment I caught a tweet from forums member Ben Klass about a new Android app (iOS version soon) called Snoobe, which promises to deliver the perfect mobile phone plan to the palm of your hand.

The team behind Snoobe is based in Montreal; thus the current Play Store version of the app is optimized for Canadian consumers. Users in the U.S. are encouraged to download a beta from the company website.

This Canadian installed Snoobe on his Nexus 5 yesterday and tried it out. ...

I've been sitting on this Google+ post from Xiaomi's Hugo Barra for about a week now. Don't let the poor quality of the photo dissuade you from its significance; this is (I believe) the first public photo of Barra on this side of the world since he left Google to work for Xiaomi last summer. Not only that, but he's apparently here on business, talking to Brazilian officials about bringing China's smartphone sensation to that country.

So why Brazil and not the USA? Is it favouritism at play here for this Brazilian-born exec? Or is there something specific to the North American market that's keeping Xiaomi away? ...

When WIND Mobile pulled out of Canada's 700MHz LTE auction at the 11th hour last January my knee-jerk reaction was to fear the worst. Around that time plans from both the Big Three and their subsidiaries weren't actually terrible; now that the spectrum auction is over and done with prices from everyone have gone up —with the exception of our struggling upstarts, of course.

As a quick demonstration of how things have changed in just two months, Here are the before and after prices of 4 and 6GB monthly data buckets from the usual suspects. 5 GB would be a more fair comparison to WIND and Mobilicity, but I'm going to be lazy and calculate costs without overages where I can.

Oh, and I'm also going to assume that (1) you're in Ontario and (2) you're bringing your own device to the equation. The black art of device subsidies is entirely beyond the scope of my high school math.

On to the numbers. ...

Just got word of Bell's new Q2 rate plans. Is it a coincidence that since Wind didn't participate in the recent spectrum auction rates have been inching up on all of the big 3? Should be interesting to see if rates continue to go up in the coming quarters.

These consumer plans are effective March 15th. The plans have changed slightly but it looks like the cheapest Voice and Data Plus plans now start at $80 instead of $75 (click image to view full size):



These small business plans are effective March 14th. They start at $85, up from $80. The plans appear unchanged on they're now all $5 more expensive (click image to view full size):



What do you call it when prices rise across the board? ...

Just got word that when the Samsung Galaxy S5 comes to Bell it will be available in black or white. They'll be carrying the 16GB version (approx ~8GB of free space) for $699.95 off contract.

Good to know that they're keeping prices in line with the GS4 when it launched even though the Canadian dollar has been slipping lately. ...

Peter Nowak was previously mentioned on these forums as one of my heroes of mobile tech. Yesterday he tweeted this:


Unless I'm mistaken, the "heat" he refers to is coming from Roam Mobility and, to a lesser extent, KnowRoaming. And unless I missed it, Peter didn't pursue the story any further, so I thought I'd step in. ...

Last Friday we learned that TELUS was leaving the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association. At this point it's old news — stale enough that I'm adding this post to an existing thread on that same subject. It's also not the CWTA's first defection; upstart carriers Mobilicity, Public Mobile and WIND pulled out simultaneously in the spring of 2013.

So a lot of sound bites and official statements were flying about last week, and one of them escaped me altogether: There's potentially another Big Three carrier that might break rank and exit the CWTA as well. ...

About a week and a half ago I included in a daily news round-up a report by OpenSignal entitled The State of LTE (February 2014). Brazilian carrier Claro gets bragging rights for the network operator with the fastest download speed, but Australia gets the nod for the country with the fastest LTE speeds overall — 24.5 Mbps download on average.

And me, living in Canada where LTE is pretty fast (ranking 6th) but expensive, can't help but wonder how much Australians are paying for their super-fast data service. Let's investigate. ...