Rogers pushing wireless substitution and affordable mobile browsing

Rogers Communications Inc. is trying to push wireless substitution to new heights with the introduction of Fido UNO and Rogers Home Calling Zone, two new services that allow consumers to use their cell phone as their home phone. "For that purpose, if have any home phone whether it's Rogers, Bell, Telus or any home phone that want to go to a single phone, certainly this is a service that for," Upinder Saini, VP of product and content development, tells Report on Wireless. One phone, one number, one address book, one voicemail are some of the advantages that Saini cites for the services. "You don't need to worry about two numbers and two devices," he says. Both services are competitively priced at $15 per month for unlimited local calling and $20 per month for unlimited local and Canadian long distance. Customers will also have to subscribe to a wireless voice plan. Rogers insists the service won't have a negative impact in cannibalizing its home phone customer base. And while that may be true of Fido subscribers who generally live in urban areas, list the cell phone as their only mode of voice communications, and therefore don't have a Rogers landline to cancel, the same can't be said of Rogers subscribers. According to RoW's calculations, Rogers landline service with about four hours of long distance a month would cost approximately $35 per month. Adding the $20 per month for unlimited local and Canadian LD to a $25 voice plan that includes 250 anytime minutes could be an enticing price point. Eliminating the home phone service to go with the new Rogers Home Calling Zone plan seems targeted to the family with a stay at home parent or a family with grown children no longer living at home or even to people who take parental leave. The home phone element of the service is made possible by a standard wireless router optimized to improve voice quality over the WiFi network and to improve battery performance while talking in the range of the router. Saini says the service works with other wireless routers as well. The router, which comes free with a subscription, can also be used to set a wireless network within the home. The company currently offers two Nokia handsets for the service and more are expected to be launched in the coming months. Asked whether the iPhone will be part of the line of handsets for this service, Saini couldn't say. Recent figures from Statistics Canada reveal that about 6.4% of Canadian households were wireless only at the end of 2007, a jump of more than 1% from the previous year. Alberta and British Columbia led the way in cell phone-only homes with the latter topping the 10% mark. Mobile browsing rates coming down When Rogers announced the availability of the Nokia N95 last week, the company also revealed the new Unlimited On-Device Mobile Browsing plan for $7 per month, a price that, according to Saini, will help spur uptake of mobile browsing. "The industry is evolving the pricing overall, and if you look at the industry evolution, what you're seeing is a reflection of that," he says. "With respect to this price for on-device browsing, adoption is something that you need to keep in mind very, very good price, attractive price which is going to help overall adoption of the browsing services." As previously reported, the unlimited on-device browsing plan has its limitations though. Users won't be allowed to use certain third-party applications and won't be able to use the device as a modem tethered to their PC. "If you get out of that browser session and you find applications that you download onto your device and those are non-browser applications, then those are not included as part of the package," Saini confirms. Unauthorized applications will be charged at a rate of $0.05 per KB of data downloaded. However, he wasn't able to confirm whether this type of rate plan was required to finalize the agreement with Apple Inc. to bring the iPhone to Canada. "Unfortunately that's not something that I will comment on because as you can appreciate the agreements that take place between two parties are all protected by confidentiality and ," he says.

Rogers pushing wireless substitution and affordable mobile browsing

News | May 8, 2008

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