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rogers Telecom

What Canada Telecom Needs To Grow

The Canadian Telecom Summit 2014 was held at the Toronto Congress Centre earlier this month. In one of his speeches during the course of the event, Rogers CEO Guy Laurence, made a bold statement – as an industry, telecom was resorting to complex pricing plans and methods that was not helping their customers get productive. One example of productivity that Guy mentioned was with respect to resolving issues through a call centre. Guy said that a lot of people do not want to talk to a call center person regarding these complexities because that inevitably stretches the discussion to 30 minutes or more. People want to go online and fix their problem in 3 minutes, not 30.

What Guy mentioned illustrates the growing need for telecom operators to make their after-sales support and service seamless and frictionless. With telecom operators today offering a wide range of services from landline, wireless, broadband, business networking, broadband TV, etc., customers find it cumbersome simply juggling through the various options thrown at them by the IVRS before they can talk to a customer service representative.

The good news is that the telecom operators are already looking at ways to streamline the operations. Guy Laurence is only six months into his job and has announced plans to streamline operations within the company to increase customer productivity. Rogers is not alone. One of the other companies that is seen to taking up rapid strides in this area is Manitoba based AllStream. Last month, AllStream became the first major telecom network in Canada to be MEF CE 2.0 certified. In a press release, AllStream noted that this certification is an acknowledgement of process innovation in their E-Line and E-Access line of carrier ethernet network services. These services in the company’s portfolio are aimed at simplifying the network infrastructure for organizations in multiple locations.

The announcement of simplification of processes is a great step for better telecom infrastructure in Canada. A study published by The School Of Public Policy last year noted that while the pricing policies of Canadian telecom providers was not out of the ordinary and compared well with similar markets worldwide, one of the main reasons that is ailing the sector is ‘political interference’ which in turn has been the reason for the general lack of innovation within the industry.

Various studies have shown that Canada is witnessing robust growth in modern telecom services including wireless technology. The subscriptions and consequently the revenue growth have been multi-fold over the past decade or two. The rapid growth could often make old restrictive practices redundant. The need of the hour is then for the government to take a re-look at all the policies and amend them in order to ensure telecom carriers can grow freely and widely in future. This, and the competition that will ensue will be the primary driver for simplification and process improvements that this industry so desperately needs.

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Mobile RIM rogers

New Rogers Voice Plans For Blackberry Announced

Rogers Canada has announced a number of new voice plans for their Blackberry customers that brings attractive pay as you go options to the subscribers. There are now two new pay by the month plans that require subscribers to pay $40 or $55 a month. The two plans are not too different but for the fact that the $40 plan allows subscribers unlimited local voice calling between 3PM and 6PM; whereas the $55 plan makes the same offer between 6PM and 7AM on weekdays and for the entire duration of the weekend. You can also choose the Social plans that offer unlimited social networking on websites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

The new plans are significantly higher than the older plans since charges are close to $25 more here on an average. But what’s interesting is that the new plans does not tie the subscriber to a three year contract. So you are free to sign out when you wish to.
Rogers Blackberry PAYG Voice plan

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Apple bell Business canada iPad iphone 4 News rogers

Can You Share Your iPhone Data Plan With iPad?

Yes you can. But only if you live in Canada. Much to the envy of Apple customers around the world, Canadian carrier Rogers has announced a new data sharing option that will allow iPhone 4 customers to share their data plan with their iPad. Accordingly, if you are on the 6GB data plan, you can now share your plan between your iPhone 4 and iPad by paying an additional monthly fee of $20. However, a big caveat here – This data sharing option is presently on a limited period trial and will end on September 30. The $20 fee will exclude the government’s regulatory recovery fee.

If this sounds awesome, check out the other deal from Bell Canada. The Rogers rival carrier has announced a largely similar offer, except that the iPad data sharing option is available at only $10 a month.

Technically, this is not too different from what AT&T offers with its tethering functionality. American iUsers may note that Ma Bell offers tethering at an additional cost of $20 per month to their Data Pro subscirbers. However, this tethering functionality is not compatible with the iPad.

Nevertheless, this is a good start and hope more carriers start offering such data sharing services (at little to no monthly fee of course)