Just for kicks. The “base” iPhone plan in Canada (by our favorite company Rogers Wireless) is advertised at $60/month. This plan manages to offer what I like to call “No Value Whatsoever” – whereas Rogers believes it offers their customers “flexibility” and “special value bundles”. I don’t know how Yoga relates to this, and unless Rogers hired a marketing person who believes that “special value bundles” is synonymous with “getting stabbed in the eye and kicked in the face” – I think that someone has a very perplexing idea as to the meaning of the word “value”.

As if it weren’t bad enough, let’s see what the actual cost is if you want your phone to be usable. By usable I mean have a half decent number of text messages, Call Display and a moderate 6GB of data (now advertised at $30/month from Rogers if you sign up before August 31st). So now what’s the cost of those 150 minutes plus a half decent amount of data?

$ 60.00 - Basic Voice Plan
$ 30.00 - 6GB of Data
$ 15.00 - iPhone "value pack" to get call display and some text messages
$  6.95 - Standard System Access Fee
$  0.50 - 911 Fee
$  5.62 - GST
—————————————
$118.07 per month.

This might be off by a few cents, because I don’t know if they charge GST on the System Access Fee and 911 Fee. But as far as I’m concerned, and for all intents and purposes, the real cost of actually having an iPhone on the basic plan with the features that actually make it usable for what it’s designed to be is almost DOUBLE the advertised price set out by Rogers.

I don’t know what you call that, but I call it lying, cheating your customers and downright scummy business.