Why I am not getting an iPhone anytime soon

I was chatting briefly with Melinda last week and she complimented me on my blog. She's very impressed with my writing style, and she singled out what I seem to recall was my very first post, complaining about the failed delivery of a boxed set of Cosmos DVDs, for praise. (Reduced to reading back issues of my bitching and complaining… I'm sure the poor dear will feel better once her kids get back from visiting their grandmother in Romania.)

I open with this because I've got something else to bitch and complain about, namely one of my favourite hobbyhorses: Canadian cell phone carriers. Of course, anyone who's glanced at the business or technology section of a newspaper or website in the past few months is aware that the iPhone has finally been released here, amid a chorus of complaints about Rogers' exorbitant pricing (though not nearly as exorbitant as Vodafone's in Italy). Frankly, reading about the proposed boycott, I could only wonder what everyone was so surprised for – it's not like Rogers was out of line with industry practice, after all. Canadian cell phone customers are so accustomed to being gouged and trampled that I thought we'd achieved a state of learned helplessness, like the dogs in those electric shock experiments. If you get brutalized enough and can be convinced that nothing you can do will make it stop, you become apathetic and thus easy prey for more mistreatment.

I learned my lesson the hard way when I signed up for a plan with Bell Mobility that was quoted to me at $25 a month (they called it the CAW plan, and offered it because I told them I work for Chrysler, even though I'm not a union member), and was stupidly astonished a few months later to find that I was being debited something more like $85 a month. At that moment I achieved enlightenment and knew that I would never again chain myself to a contract or any plan that forced me to pay for more service than I was using.

Of course, once my contract finally expired, I wanted to stop giving my money to Bell altogether and as soon as possible, but certain exigencies conspired to slow me down:

(1) My phone was locked and would not work with another carrier. Well, I wanted to upgrade my phone anyway. However:

(2) No other carrier seemed interested in selling me a new phone at a reasonable price; either they would charge me $250 up front for a phone that might be worth a third of that, or they would call it a "free" phone … as long as I signed a contract. This was an absolute non-starter.

(3) The industry dragged its feet as long as possible in introducing phone number portability, which would enable me to keep my existing number if I changed carriers.

The above factors kept me effectively stuck with Bell through another long wait until portability came in and, after more shopping around, I discovered that Virgin Mobile would actually sell me a new (much nicer) phone at a straightforward price and take me on as a customer with no contract. Finally! All I had to put up with now was their juvenile marketing, aimed at guys in their early twenties – tolerable enough under the circumstances.

So here at last comes the mighty iPhone, complete with high-speed Internet access, GPS, seriously cool touch interface, and all the rest of it. And here's me, one of their prime targets – not an Apple worshiper by any stretch, but a technophile who appreciates it for its real strengths, already carries a separate phone and iPod most places, and would happily combine them into one. But I won't give up the expectation that I get the value I'm paying for, or sign away the freedom to stop paying for it if I damn well feel like stopping. Until Rogers or some other carrier will actually take the risk of losing me if I'm not satisfied, they can do without my business.

Postscript: According to today's news, the CRTC spectrum auction just concluded could actually lead to more choice and greater competition among Canada's wireless carriers. About freakin' time.