Tag Archives | Canada

Rogers Has One Bucket of Data for Two Mobile Devices

Oh Canada, land of free health care, and now home to a data plan that can be used across multiple devices.

Rogers’ so-called data share costs $15 per month on top of existing mobile broadband plans. Subscribers can then share up to 5 GB of data between a smartphone and another device (think tablets or 3G-ready laptops).

I’ve hoped that U.S. carriers would move in this direction ever since AT&T and Verizon Wireless started offering capped data plans. If there’s going to be a limit on how much data you can consume, consumers should be able to use that data however they want. After all, your home Internet service provider doesn’t care whether you’re on a laptop, tablet or game console, so why should wireless carriers?

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Twitter Shuts Down SMS in Canada

Twitter logoThe micro-blogging service has now pulled the plug on outbound SMS alerts, citing escalating costs. This is the second market where usage of the SMS functionality has been restricted. The other country to lose SMS was the UK, where the plug was pulled in August.

Canadians will still be able to send Tweets to the Canadian shortcode (21212), but “unexpected changes in our billing” caused the company to stop outgoing texts. It claims costs have doubled over the past two months to continue providing the service.

“There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world.) We’re working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress,” the company said in a post it its status blog.

It is unclear what this means to the future of Twitter SMS here in the US, although the company has said earlier that deals with carriers are allowing the tweets to continue flowing.

However, with still no real revenue stream, and venture capital funding nearly the entire operation, its not hard to imagine that SMS may be considered non-essential when it comes time to make some cuts to save money.

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