If companies like WIND and Public Mobile truly want to offer change, they have to start with the contracts. And no lame promotional deals, either. They simply cannot promise pie-in-the-sky stuff out of the gate if they want to remain relevant and if they want to take on the dominant players. Rogers, Bell and Telus already have the territory (and they are acquiring more by the day) and the customer bases by default. Fringe players will need to learn to play by other rules to gain the public trust and they’ll need to prove that they can be significant options from the norm we’re all so used to here.

Low and behold, after much checking and to my surprise, Rogers is the only carrier on the planet that blocks non domestic IP’s on UMA. That right, you heard me correctly – Rogers offers a UMA IP service that only works in Canada – and you have to pay for it.

UMA on all other carriers is included free of charge, your Blackberry or UMA enabled handset will roam on any wifi network worldwide and allow you to make and receive calls as if you are connected to your carriers national network (this makes sense as it costs the NOTHING). On Rogers, not only do you have to pay for it – they block it when you are outside of Canada.

I actually know people that have made calls while connected to inflight wifi – via their UMA service on Telefonica or Verizon. On Rogers this is not possible.

So having said that, it is in no way surprising that Bell is doing this – perhaps in time the competition factor of additional carriers in Canada will allow for this collusion on roaming to be stopped, but until then we have to sit and watch the CRTC do nothing yet again….

Because no corporation of any kind wants customers to save money in the long haul. They may promote the illusion of savings through discounts and lower prices to hook customers in to long-term contracts, like Bell, Telus and Rogers do frequently with the abhorrent three-year contracts, but they don’t really want anybody to “save money.”

In theory competition is meant to bring rates down, sure, but how has that ever worked out in practice? Competition means that the market share once enjoyed by Bell, Telus and Rogers is going to be split up into smaller pieces. It stands to reason that those companies, thinking they have a hold on Canada’s customers, will jack their prices up slowly but surely over the long haul so as to increase their piece of the pie. They know they stand to lose a little, so what we’re seeing now is a series of decisions meant to recoup expected losses.