Well, welcome to the 21st century and the rest of the world.
It's a start, abeit a very sad start.
When my wife first came to Canada, she was looking around to find a place where she could get a SIM card for her blackberry she has with a phone company back here in Australia..... and surprise surprise, the only company that sold SIM cards in Nova Scotia was Rogers.... and they wouldn't sell it to you unless you A) were a customer of Rogers or B) bought a phone from Rogers.
So she had to suffer through roaming charges just like the rest of us Canadians.
Why?
Because the cell phone companies in Canada are corrupt, money grabbing, suck-holes, that's why.....
Frig, kids in Africa get cell phones cheaper then Canadians do, and with more bells & whistles..... here in Australia, cell phones are cheaper and have better deals then LAN phones.
And only in Canada will the government allow cell phone companies to keep an additional charge on your bills for helping build reception towers that was supposed to be taken off in the late 90's.... just by simply changing the name of the charge on your bill. I believe they're calling it a "convenience fee" these days.
Not very convenient if you ask me.
Now Telus is tossing a bone with allowing unlocking of their cell phones..... but not until you pay them $50 and not for at least 90 days..... wow..... whoopty frigity dooo.......
why?
Because they fear those people might head off to a competitor.
*COUGHCOUGHBULLSH*TCOUGHCOUGH*
Last I checked, besides pay as you go plans, everybody else from every other cell phone provider in Canada still slaps you with a 3 year contract..... or a two year contract if you'll accept being charged more..... and thus, if those people decide to break their contract and go to another provider, they get dinged for even more charges and penalties then it's worth...... so that excuse is a load of crap in a bucket.
As Andem mentioned and as the original article mentioned, all you need to do is go to
"grey market retailers or 'unlockers' " to get this done and for less then $50.... so Telus isn't doing anything great or profound here...... and it's not like these unlockers are mobsters in the back of a pool hall who'll gut you and drop you in the harbour with concrete shoes....... as Andem said, Telus is just trying to get into that market and try and get some more money..... while others will just think unlocking their phone will be too much and end up getting dinged with roaming charges..... so they still win.
Let me look out the window here in Australia and see if the cell phone providers here are having huge issues with their customers running around with the competition......... nope...... because they all have unlocked cell phones here and allow everybody to put in all sorts of SIM cards right from the get-go..... and nobody has gone out of business because of it....... so that argument is also a crock-pot of crap.
The sooner all the cell phone companies in Canada stop treating their customers like child-minded idiots, the better off everybody will be (the customers and the providers)....... but people still accept all of this, so they have no real incentive to change..... thus they'll still keep treating their customers like child-minded idiots, all the while they continue to rake in all the profits.
All the cell phone providers in Canada are a lot like the gas stations and politicians..... it's a collective monopoly shared amongst the few. They all get together and have a good ol laugh, eat their 'kaviar, drink their cham'pagen and think of ways to further screw their clients...... then they turn around with their two-face attitudes to us all and play the good cop/bad cop routine, while the majority of us suck it all in like gullible little guppies.
But then again, what else can we do?
We need the gas for our cars and they're the only providers, so we have to pay what they demand.
We need to vote in the same clowns into our government(s) because they're the only options to choose from and any other options to vote for are just throw away votes....... or so
they say.
We need to deal with these cell phone providers because there aren't any others to choose from.... and we need our cell phones..... otherwise how else will we crash our vehicles due to distraction....... how else will we be able to have every single person on the planet be able to contact us instantly because we and they are so god damn important that we have to stop whatever we're doing to talk to them or txt them about what we ate at KFC???
....... Heaven forbid that they actually call us on our home phones and leave a damn message to get back to them when we're not out doing something else...... cripes, grandma could have fallen down the stairs and wasn't able to get up!!!!
You just never know....... oh the worry of it all!
My precious little babies might get snatched up by some pedophile outside of their school, or one of their school mates might pull out an automatic SMG and gun them all down........ I'll need to instantly be called by them just as they get shot so I can hear them scream and agony and take their last breath over the phone..... There's not a damn thing I can do about it, because by the time I get the message and know what's going on, and by the time I get there to the rescue, it'll all be done and over with........ the best I can hope for is to get that call, hear them scream HEEEELLLLPPPP as they're shot or kidnapped, distract the crap out of me that I veer into the other lane of the highway during rush hour, crash and die!
Bravo..... *clap clap*
What's my point here?
I like stories.
