UMB will be gone June 30th, 2013 | Page 4 | 7-Eleven Rates and Plans | Consumer forum

andrewtheboss said:

Cold Cash said:

chimpanzee said:

kids are different. two people in this household, one using 30MB(but 100 is more comfortable for occasional on the street map search), another 300MB.

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I think you aren't aware of what Rogers is doing let alone their competition.

Rogers offers a data plan which is $60 for 10GB(!) per month.

Realistically, SO could probably rig a Pay As You Go
for anywhere from $6 to $7.50 per GIGAbyte ( never mind megabytes )
possibly with a 365 expiry and still be profitable.

Also, with the Rogers switch to LTE, they have lots
of 3G capacity to either resell or rip out. SO might
do even better than we realize.

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Rogers will probably lease out their 3G network to speakout, like Coldcash said. If rogers leased out their 1G and 2G/EDGE network to speakout, they'll probably do it again with speakout. I doubt they're going to come out with a $7.50/GB plan, as most speakout users are minimalists with speakout as backup. If even PC Mobile is doing $5/100 MB, I think $5/ 500MB is reasonable. What do you guys think?

I appreciate where all the commentators here are coming from, and I like the rest am only speculating. But, consider that SO offered unlimited browsing for $10/mth and after a while essentially started capping it after 2GB. Could that have been the "pain" point for them? If so, then $5 /GB may well be reasonable, particularly if they do this on a pay as you go deal. Many don't need GBytes, and many do. The key is SO might be able to swing it based on whatever bulk wholesale deal they can swing.

Personally I have no idea what SO will do. But I imagine they, like any other business, want to increase subscribers, not lose them. If they can profitably meet the expectations of their existing base, I figure they will have a pretty decent chance at increasing subscribers as well.

Speakout replied to a post on Facebook:

"We are currently finalizing data plans and will be able to share once they are confirmed. I can tell you that the new data plans will be capped at varying MB & GB buckets to satisfy varying demands of our users. SpeakOut is always working hard to provide offerings that meet or beat current offers from our competitors. Our current offering is for Browsing only, so the Data feature is something new & improved we are bringing to SpeakOut Wireless, which our users have been asking for. Again, once we have confirmed our Data offerings, we will let everyone know as soon as possible."

Every one here talking about price this and that. The people who don't need data or don't know how to use just putting random numbers without any consideration. But who really use it and do need it for their daily life are really worried. As we know in Canada all these wireless providers are squeezing consumers for their unrealistic profits more than any where in the world. $10 for just 100 MB is a rip off. Few days back there was a news that MTS's more than 37% of its profit is from wireless data. I wonder why consumers watchdog are not looking into this.

one more question to those who don't use data and happy with voice, if tomorrow SO make the voice call from 25 cent to 50 cent and because I am not interested in voice and say that its ok. How would they feel?

benice said:

As we know in Canada all these wireless providers are squeezing consumers for their unrealistic profits more than any where in the world. $10 for just 100 MB is a rip off. Few days back there was a news that MTS's more than 37% of its profit is from wireless data. I wonder why consumers watchdog are not looking into this.

I'm not sure where you are getting your data regarding MTS's "unrealistic profits". Yes, 37% of their profits may have come from wireless data, but that is not the same as making a 37% profit. Here's an article on MTS's latest (May 8, 2013) financial report:

http://business.financialpost......-year-ago/

In the last quarter, they made $30.9 million on revenue of $406.7 million, which means that just 7.6% of their revenue was profit. That's a reasonable return, but certainly not an unfair windfall for such a capital-intensive business.

And, as has been pointed out numerous times, it just isn't realistic to compare the "rip off" rates we pay in Canada to rates in other countries. There are simply too many factors (primarily geography vs. market size) to make such comparisons valid.

I don't think anyone is promoting the death of UMB, this is all just our speculation. I have a second SIM with UMB activated on it for two months to see if I could find a way to incorporate it into my lifestyle and to be honest it didn't work for me but further back I did use UMB for around 1 year. For some it's fine, for others it's not ideal and I think that's the esssense of what people have been saying here. I found that having an unhindered data bucket was more useful to me. Who knows, maybe I'll come back to SO after their announcement.

And if you're worried about SO monitoring the thread to validate their decision, you've likely been equally worried about all the big mouths who publicly bragged about how many gigabytes of data they squeezed out of UMB. Of course they don't need to troll the forum boards, they can just look at their utilization stats to see what the actual usage has been and make educated decisions from there.

I'll side with Bridonca on this one. I too topped up in April with the $100 promo. What is sleazy about the way they do things is that then continued to send emails during April urging people to top up. Then, on May 1, the day after the end of the promo, they announce that they are shutting down UMB. I'm sorry, but this is bordering on unethical.

fefrie said:

Hey, here's another idea, unlimited 2G data $5.

This is a really good idea. I'd be able to get email, weather updates and do basic browsing. T-Mobile offers this (along with unlimited text and voice) for $2/day.

Well, I've been giving this some thought, as have a lot of others. And I realize that the death of UMB is really not going to make a whole heap of difference in my life. I have been with Speakout since 2004-2005, and the primary attraction even back in the voice-only days was that any airtime amount was good for 365 days. Even a minimal top-up rolled everything over for another year.

This has been a great feature for me. I've got a trio of unlocked Motorola V3's with SO SIM cards, one in each car and one in the 3/4 ton, packed in a watertight box with a spare battery, charger cord, list of emergency numbers like AMA road service and RCMP, as well as friends in various towns, etc. They get their charge topped up every few months, but that's just my "belt and suspenders" approach to travel in winter on the Prairies – I left one for a whole year and it still had a 97 percent battery charge.

The V3's were originally Rogers – two I'd purchased and one a gift. I paid a cellphone shop $10 to unlock them. Even if I'd had to buy a low-end Nokia handset for each vehicle for the same purpose, I'd still have one in every vehicle. A single use in mid-February, a white-out blizzard, black ice, and -25 C and the car in a ditch makes the $25 annual top-up very cheap insurance. Been there, done that – it was a great feeling to take out the phone and get Emergency Road Service on the line, and a call in to my destination to let them know I'd been ditched. I even booked a motel room in the next nearest town. Yeah, that was well worth the $25.

(I'd left my "daily" phone at home because the Major National Carrier who hosted my day-to-day phone would neither repair, replace, or make right the fact that their uber-fancy phone dropped every call after 4-5 seconds – and I had been trying for some time too get that sorted. More on that later.)

I got another, a cheapie Nokia, brand new for 10 bucks on Kijiji with an un-activated SIM card, and gave it to my 87 year old mother. She carries it in her purse. It's only got three numbers programmed in as speed dials: Me, Ambulance, and Police. She's used it twice in the year she's had it, once to me when a cab failed to arrive and it was -35 outside, and the second time to call an ambulance when she took a header on an icy sidewalk. $25? Again, cheap and worth every penny.

My own daily SO phone is a Nokia C3 (and what a piece of junk it is too), I put it on a minimal monthly voice+data plan. I don't talk a lot on the phone, text maybe 3-4 times a month if that, and I do use the Gmail access that the C3 provides. But as any kind of an internet web browsing tool? It's garbage, and so I don't think I've even bothered trying to use it for the last three months. I had it in mind to cancel the UMB plan anyway, and go to a minimal voice-only monthly plan, so the loss of the UMB plan doesn't bother me a great deal. I'm a typical minimalist user – between 100 and 150 minutes per month of talking, on average, and very little else. So, the "Monthly Value Plan" has worked out really well, and I expect it will continue to do so. The cost is about 1/10th of my former cellphone carrier.

What I have found is a great bargain has been the International Long Distance add-on. I have expat friends in Washington State, New Zealand, and Madagascar, and calling them using the local acccess number and the ILD plan is superb. Seattle is 2 cents a minute. Madagascar is 5 cents. I don't know anywhere else where I can have that available for $1.95 per month.

My last "full feature" carrier before I switched my main number to Speakout was XXXX [I've been cautioned against naming names. My XXXX bill, even with their various combined "Value Plans, was rarely less than $125/month. The HTC phone was an under-performer as a "data phone", and when it broke – dropped every voice call after 4-5 seconds, the XXXX company hemmed and hawed and refused to either fix it or replace it, or even offer me some kind of a deal on a new phone.

When I'd had four or five months of this B.S., I took stock of what I'd actually used the phone for when it worked. The internet use was generally either Google maps or some local information lookup. Without the phone, and with the huge number of WiFi hotspots, I looked on Kijiji and found a serviceable, cheap notebook with Wireless G that I can take into Tim Horton's or anywhere else that has "complimentary internet", and do exactly the same thing. I found a car charging cord for $5 on Amazon.

The HTC had had a GPS and moving map display. However, my Garmin mobile GPS does pretty much the same thing already. So what was there about XXXX's service that was indispensible? And the answer was: Nothing.

XXXX charged huge amounts of money, gave less than zero customer service, and their data network didn't offer anything I couldn't live without. When I attempted to leave XXXX at the end of my contract period, they sent me a very large four-figure bill – "Termination Expenses", they said.

Bat Puckey.

I took their bill, and then made a list of all my dates and times and call durations trying to get a working telephone through Customer Service and Tech Support over a five month period. I billed out the time at my standard professional daily rate – $1750/day, with a 4-hour minimum, plus travel – and made up an invoice with all of the calls I'd made broken down, and notes on the results. I included the names of the people to whom I'd spoken and for how long, as well as the lack of result from each call. This also came to a very large amount. I sent it off to them, registered and signature required, along with a notice to appear in small claims court.

Figuring they'd try something like "Termination Charges", I had taken the step a few days earlier of porting my number over to Speakout (I've had the same number since 2000), and the port had actually been done in 2 1/2 hours. This was to a new Nokia C3, which I'd bought at half price when I had also bought a $100/$125 airtime card. The C3 wasn't fancy, but it rang when somebody called, dialed when I needed to call someone, and didn't drop calls at random. And it had text and e-mail that actually worked. Amazing compared to the hi-tech offerings of XXXX. At that point, I was so fed up with XXXX that just being able to depend on the phone working was a major step forward. Since the C3 didn't have much by way of accessories, I browsed around on Amazon, and was able to find neoprene skins that were made for the C3 two colours (in the U.K. of all places), spare battery, a car charger cord, wall charger, computer data cable, all for about $12 including postage.
.
Well, to make a long story short, they didn't show up in court and I was awarded my claim by default. Their "Termination Charges" were deducted from my award, This left a difference of $0.53. I paid them 53 cents and got a receipt, witnessed. I also got a signed statement that this was the full and final settlement of all outstanding charges, business, or contracts. The divorce wias complete.

I took the extra step of sending notarized copies of the judgement against them, and my documentation, to the CEO and CFO of the XXXX company, and to a few other people with an interest in the whole thing. About a week later, I got a telephone call on my home land line from "someone at head office" at XXXX, And Oh, so contrite they were. It was all a great misunderstanding. (I confess I almost choked when I heard that one).

XXXX was now prepared to offer me the earth if only I would sign up with them again, including a snazzy new phone. And, all it would cost was $75 a month MORE than my previous outrageous monthly charges. Yep, that certainly appealed to me – pay XXXX about $200 a month for services I'd belatedly realized I neither used nor needed.

So, I'm now a 100% full-time Speakout customer. The service is excellent, and the cost is very good value compared to my previous experiences, not just with XXXX, but with other major carriers. My phone works, there's always someone at Customer Service with an answer to a question, and except for the little-used web browsing, I have everything I used before, except for about a tenth of the price.

For my "emergency" phones, yes, Speakout does take some money off of me every year, but on the rare occasions when i've needed the emergency phone, it's been worth the annual cost many times over. The 365 day balance retention is a big plus for these phones, while my day-to-day phone is on a monthly charge, billed agaiinst a balance I top up periodically.

If SO does decide to offer full range data services, I might consider it, depending on the price. But I realize, having looked hard at what I actually use my phones for, that I can live without it. Regardless of whatever fee they set, there will be those data users who will be unhappy. There's always going to be someone whose needs don't fit the SO marketing model. But, there are other companies, other choices. I have had business with several of them, and I have to say that for my day-to-day needs, I find it very hard to beat Speakout's plans or services. Others will disagree – their priviledge.

I wrote out the story of my previous national provider to show just how ridiculous a situation can become when dealing with a company who charge big dollars and don't give a hoot about the customer's satisfaction. That I actually had to go to the lengths I did just emphasises to me the great value that Speakout's simple, reliable service really is.

Caveat Emptor.

There are a few facts from this thread.

UMB was an amazing deal for 3G data that RoBellus services did not come close to offering. For most of, knowing we would never get an over charge from the Big Three Gougers, we had it made.

Next, most of us will sign up for the new data plan if it is fair. North America data rates and over charges compared to Europe and Asia is woefully unfair, anti-competitive and predatory.

Lastly, Data will the only service you will need. You will do your talking, chat, apps all from one data connection. The Mobile data connection will challenge your home internet eventually. It will be commodified.

Maybe you can pay less for 3G and more for LTE. Cheaper data rates during off peak hours or "off peak zones". What ever they come up with, let's see if it is fair. Because the alternative, asking the CRTC to regulate a fair environment will be years in an undertaking with unsure outcomes. Just ask Wind and Friends on how that worked out for them.