For review’s sake, here is the old Bell service structure:

Old service rates

So, on to what’s changed.

Since the names of the services remain the same, at first glance it looks like all of their services have dropped in price to the speed grade below, other than a $2 increase. For example, Performance used to cost $47.95 and Essential cost $37.95, and now Performance costs $39.95. Reducing cost is definitely good! While they were at it, Max 10 became Max 12, getting 2 Mbps faster, which is also good!

What caught my eye first, though, was the apparent decrease in speed of Performance from 7 Mbps to 6 Mbps, and the fact the bandwidth caps have been decreased in every service tier, by as much as 90% for Essential Plus! Essential Plus retains the same speed that it did before (2 Mbps/800 Kbps) but inherited the bandwidth cap of Essential, dropping from 20 GB per month to 2 GB per month!

Here’s the new service chart:

Then I realized that you can spin the change in the opposite direction to see what has really happened.

Every service tier has increased in speed to the next higher tier and increased in price by $2 per month. Essential used to be $27.95 per month, it was a 500 Kbps/500 Kbps service with a 2 GB cap, and now it’s $29.95 per month, but it’s a 2 Mbps/1 Mbps service. From that perspective, Essential has been renamed Essential Plus and the cap has remained the same. Essential Plus has been renamed Performance, Performance has been renamed Max 12, Max 10 has been renamed Max 16, and it’s Max 16 that has been eliminated… at least pricewise. This second chart illustrates what has really happened.

So every tier has gotten the speed of the next higher tier for only $2 more per month, which is wonderful news. And if you used to have Max 16, your price has just dropped $28 per month! But there’s still the little matter of the bandwidth cap, which has dropped dramatically for the top two tiers. Max 12 has dropped from 60 GB per month to 50, and Max 16 has dropped from 100 GB to 75. Where once there were two services that offered 100 GB caps and one that offered 60, now there is one that offers 75 and one that offers 50.

If you used to have one of the slower services, you’ve gained a lot of speed, and an extra 5 GB per month if you used to be on Essential Plus. If you used to have Max 10, you’re essentially getting the speed of Max 16, but you’ve gone from 100 GB per month to 50, and if you used to have Max 16, then you still do, but the price has gone down $28 per month and your bandwidth cap has dropped from 100 GB to 75.

For the few people who were on Max 16, the decrease in price probably outweighs the decrease in cap size since, if you really need 100 GB per month, you can just exceed the cap and the maximum overage is $30 per month, so the cost hasn’t really changed if you use more than 75 GB per month, but it has dropped dramatically if you use less than 75 GB per month. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the largest cap that Bell offers is only 75 GB per month now. The fact that the highest price has dropped to $59.95 is a VERY good thing, and that’s exactly the way it should be until Bell starts offers a 25 and 50 Mbps service of their own. Still, the decrease in bandwidth cap is worrying, and is no doubt a trend that Bell would like to continue.

Reducing the number of tiers to four is something I consider praiseworthy, and I like the fact that Bell no longer has a service that is slower than 2 Mbps. The speed increments also make sense, smoothly increase from 2 to 6 to 12 to 16 Mbps. On speed and price, Bell is heading in the right direction. They got it wrong on the bandwidth caps, though. Max 12 should have a 60 GB cap (less than the old Max 10, but the same as the old Performance which the new Max 12 replaces at the same price), and Max 16 should still have a 100 GB cap.

As I see it, there are now six price tiers of internet service available to Bell and Rogers customers, and Bell has no answer to Rogers’ two fastest tiers. In the four tiers in which they do compete, though, their services are generally slightly more expensive, but MUCH faster. Here’s a comparison of Rogers and Bell. I removed the cost for exceeding the bandwidth cap for simplicity’s sake, and since there wasn’t much difference.

Bell in Blue, Rogers in Red

As you can see, it isn’t pretty for Rogers. In Tier I, Bell is 4x faster downstream and 3x faster upstream. In Tier II, Bell is 2x faster down and 4x faster up. In Tier III, Bell is 20% faster down and 2x faster up. In Tier IV, Bell is 60% faster downstream. Rogers has a monopoly on Tier V and VI, but who really pays $100 to $150 per month for internet service? Even if those tiers were available in my area — which they aren’t, despite being the second largest city in the Rogers service area and the nation’s capital — I wouldn’t upgrade my internet service unless I won the lottery.

Rogers should consider doing the same thing that Bell just did, and push everybody up one speed grade at the same price. Rogers’ 3 Mbps service should compete with Bell’s 2 Mbps; Rogers’ 10 should compete with Bell’s 6; Rogers’ other 10 should compete with Bell’s 12; and Rogers’ 25 should compete with Bell’s 16. And while you’re at it, how about making a difference between Express and Extreme other than the upload speed?!

I’m sure that Rogers is going to do just that, but the part that worries me is that Rogers still has higher bandwidth caps in each tier. The Bell cap reductions will give Rogers and excuse to reduce the cap on their $46.99 service from 60 GB to 50, and on their $59.99 service from 95 GB to 75 GB… or less. Bell has justified reducing their bandwidth caps by giving everyone a speed boost for $2, so Rogers will probably do the same. Whereas it seems intuitive that bandwidth caps will slowly increase as the cost of bandwidth decreases for ISPs, it looks like the trend in Canada is that bandwidth caps are going to slowly decrease! The big question is, how low will they go?

The Extreme Plus service has also been bumped from 18 Mbps to 25 Mbps, the bandwidth cap has increased from 95 GB to 125 GB per month, and the price has dropped from $99.95 to $95.95 per month. Woah, wait a second! The 25 Mbps service is still $95.95? So how much does the 50 Mbps service cost? $149.99 per month.

Okay, try to breathe. I mean, yes, it does cost $60.04 per month more than Videotron’s $89.95 50 Mbps service that has been available in Quebec for years, but Rogers doesn’t compete with Videotron! The one and only advantage that Rogers’ new Ultimate service offers over Videotron is that the upload speed on Ultimate is 2 Mbps, while Videotron’s Ultimate 50 service only uploads at 1 Mbps. Rogers has become the first major ISP in Canada to offer a 2 Mbps upload service. Is that worth $60 per month? Of course not, but Rogers is a cable monopoly and if they decided to charge $200 per month, what are you going to do, move to Quebec?

Anyway, here’s the updated Rogers service list, with the much cheaper services from Videotron for comparison.

Rogers

Videotron

So, a 50/2 Mbps service is finally available in Canada! Let’s see how that compares with Verizon’s FiOS in the United States.

Verizon FiOS

Interesting. So, for the same price as Rogers’ 50/2 Mbps service, Verizon’s service is 50 Mbps in both directions! Four cents less per month, and 25 times faster upload speeds. Jealous yet? Even their $59.95 “Faster” plan offers 5 Mbps upload speed — 10 times what I get currently — which would make me the happiest webmaster in the world. Their “Fast” service, which is identically priced to the Rogers Express service that I get, still has a 4 times faster upload speed. Once again, the slower upload speeds available in Canada are not technical limitations of the DSL specification or DOCSIS 2/3 standard, but are part of Canadian ISPs’ efforts to reduce costs by limiting file sharing speeds. I’m pretty sure that Verizon is making a profit, so this is really just a symptom of the lack of competition in Canada.

Finally, an interesting note about anyone planning to get Rogers’ new 25 or 50 Mbps services: Customers will reportedly be required to purchase a combination router and wireless-N gateway for $200, since many older routers appear to have problems with the new DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems. I suppose that’s not very expensive if you were willing to pay $100 or $150 per month for internet service, but it certainly should give any potential customer a moment of hesitation. If a piece of equipment is required to provide a service, the service provider should put that equipment in your home for free and take it back when you cancel your service. If you don’t return the equipment, then they can charge you for it!

Two weeks after I wrote that post, respected technology website ExtremeTech published an article called The Pathetic State of Broadband in America. Loyd Case wrote about how his internet connection, a 16 Mbps download but 768 Kbps upload service, just wasn’t meeting his needs. The upload speed was too slow for for uploading files to ExtremeTech or batches of high resolution photos to Flickr. Most people used to use the internet connection to take things from the internet, but now it has evolved into a place where people are increasingly putting things onto the internet! We are a society of tweeters and picture and movie uploaders. Our supposedly high speed internet connections are up to 50 times faster at downloading than uploading, and it’s starting to prevent people from using the internet the way they want to. There is no service in Canada that has an upload speed higher than 1 Mbps, despite 50 Mbps download speeds becoming available!

Loyd also wrote about how he is reaching the limit of his comparatively massive 250 GB per month bandwidth cap (my cap is 60 GB) because his family likes to watch television and movies on Hulu and Netflix Streaming, as well as digital delivery of games. The internet is no longer a place to look at static text and pictures. The internet has become the long-predicted digital convergence medium: it is a television, radio, and of course a computer, all in one. At least, it’s trying to be, but North American internet service providers won’t allow it. 60 GB is scarcely two high-definition movies per month! When Hulu comes to Canada (as they plan to), we’re going to have to limit ourselves to a few hours of usage a month. Canadian bandwidth caps won’t allow significant usage of such services. While the rest of the world moves forward, we in North America will be left behind.

It’s also interesting that Loyd referenced a well known survey from October 2007 that found that the average internet speed in Japan was a whopping 93.7 Mbps. It’s kind of embarrassing to be that much slower than another country’s average from almost two years ago! Scarier, though, is the difference in cost. According to IDG, the average price per megabit in the US as of the end of 2008 was around $16.10, versus $3.80 in the Asia Pacific region. You can charge four times as much per megabit when you have a monopoly like North American cable and telephone companies do.

So, with no competition, will the state of broadband in North America ever improve?

A few weeks ago Rogers placed a little “ad” at the top of my browser window to let me know that they had upgraded my internet connection from 7 Mbps to 10 Mbps for free. You might think I’d be thrilled. You’d be wrong.

Rogers advertised the move as a 40% speed boost for free. The fact is, my download speed was already fast enough, seeing as how my bandwidth cap prevents me from doing things like streaming movies to my computer. My upload speed, on the other hand, is the same 512 Kbps that it was before. That means that if I, heaven forbid, ever have to move my website to a new webhost again, it will still take 8 hours to upload all of my files. Unless, of course, I switch to Bell Canada, which offers higher upload speeds on even their cheap internet plans. Here is the new comparison chart for Rogers and Bell internet services.

Rogers

Bell

So Rogers Hi-Speed Lite tripled in speed to 3 Mbps and Express was bumped from 7 to 10, but in both cases the upload speeds remain the same. I checked Bell’s website to see if they had increased the speed of their services to compete, and they didn’t. They didn’t have to. The reality is, you really won’t notice the difference between Rogers Hi-Speed Lite and Bell Internet Essential Plus, or between Rogers Hi-Speed Express and Bell Internet Performance while downloading. If you frequently have to upload files, on the other hand, you’ll certainly notice that Bell’s Essential Plus service lets you upload more than three times faster than Rogers Hi-Speed Lite (800 Kbps vs. 256 Kbps), and that Bell’s Internet Performance lets you upload twice as fast as Rogers Hi-Speed Express (1 Mbps vs. 512 Kbps). You don’t need a stopwatch to notice that you can upload your website in 4 hours instead of 8!

The surprising proof of my statement is that Rogers Hi-Speed Extreme didn’t get a speed boost. It’s still a 10 Mbps download service, but it costs $13 per more month than Express. The only difference between Extreme and Express is the upload speed, so clearly Rogers believes that a faster upload speed is worth something!

I just can’t get over the fact that I could increase my upload speed by 56% by downgrading to Bell’s cheaper Essential Plus service. Why is Rogers’ $50 plan slower than Bell’s $40 plan? It just boggles my mind! So if upload speed is so important to me, why haven’t I switched to Bell? I already have a Rogers bundle (cable and internet), and I don’t feel like switching to satellite television. For now, I’m stuck with Rogers, a fact that I regret more and more each day.

I’m trying to imagine how companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Netflix are going to be able to sell their download services when people have a 40 GB monthly bandwidth limit. And let’s not forget that television networks like NBC believe so strongly that they can sell episodes of their most popular shows as downloads on iTunes or Amazon that they were willing to allow their writers to go on strike for over 100 days rather than back down over the writers’ demand for a cut of download and DVD business. The American television industry collapsed over the issue, so both sides obviously believe that television over the internet is the future, but Time Warner Cable clearly isn’t going to let that happen.

On any given technology forum, Americans complain about their fear of the caps coming to their city, or their anger that it has already happened, and people from around the world tell them how lucky they are to live in a country that has such reasonable caps.

It’s certainly true that some countries have pathetically slow internet speeds at outrageous prices with unacceptable bandwidth limits. And that includes wealthy, Western nations. Australia, I’m looking in your direction. Meanwhile, Europe and Japan have 20, 50 and 100 Mbps internet for the same price or less than what we pay in North America. Pretty scary, isn’t it? The reason always ends up being the same: because cable companies own the cable lines, there is only one cable carrier in any part of the continent. Wherever you live in Canada or the US, you generally have a choice between two internet providers: the phone company and the cable company. They choose not to compete with each other, and offer the same speeds at the same price. There are, of course, internet resellers who use the phone company and the cable company’s lines, but they rarely offer better prices, don’t offer higher speeds, and can’t offer bundles. Then there are millions of North Americans who live in areas that don’t have cable, so the phone company has a monopoly on high-speed internet. There are even millions of people who can’t get high-speed internet from their phone company. Dial-up is alive and well in North America!

In the face of the growing consumer furore over bandwidth caps in the United States, I decided to compare the services of the two main internet providers in Canada. Once again, you have two options: the phone company and the cable company. The phone company is Bell, and there are three major cable companies: Rogers, Cogeco and Shaw. Rogers is, by far, the largest cable provider, so let’s use them to represent cable.

To be fair, and for the sake of simplicity, all prices are the regular price and don’t include bundle discounts.

Bell

Rogers

Both Bell and Rogers charge a rental fee on the modem: $3.95 per month for Bell and $3.00 per month for Rogers. Now, this is an interesting concept. If I don’t feel like paying for the rental, can I refuse the modem? How can they say that I’m renting a piece of equipment that they require me to have in order to use the service?

Anyway, Rogers will let you buy the modem for $99.95 in order to eliminate the rental, but Bell won’t let you buy their modem to save $4 per month. Wait, what? If there isn’t an option to buy, then it clearly isn’t a rental! I might swallow Rogers’ argument that the modem can be either purchased or rented, but with Bell you have no option; it’s just a $4 per month fee.

I’ve used Rogers Hi-Speed Express for years and I haven’t bought the modem, even though a modem purchase pays for itself in just under three years. Why haven’t I purchased it? A couple of years ago they made me replace my modem with a DOCSIS 2.0 model. What’s DOCSIS you ask? It’s the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification. DOCSIS 3.0 is already out, so I’m certainly not going to buy my 2.0 modem now! DOCSIS 3.0 will be necessary to support 50 Mbps and faster internet speeds, assuming that they ever come to Canada.

So, let’s compare the services. Generally speaking, Bell’s services are a bit more expensive than Rogers, except for Max 16. I do, however, detect a trend here. Essential has double the upload speed of Ultra Lite, Essential Plus has double the download speed and triple the upload speed of Lite, and Express has double the upload speed of Express. Regardless of the download speed, both companies limit their upload speed to 1 Mbps. Remember when I mentioned DOCSIS 2.0? It maxes out at about 27 Mbps for upload speeds, so this isn’t a technical limitation. This is an attempt by both companies to limit file sharing — especially Rogers. An 18:1 download to upload speed ratio is pretty obvious. It’s strange that Rogers is willing to let their competitor have double their upload speed in the three most popular tiers, and that alone is causing me to consider switching to Bell. As the webmaster of a game website, I have to upload a lot of files, and it takes a bloody long time to do. It took about half an hour to upload the 100 MB SimCity 3000 demo. Good grief! Changing webhosts is pretty much a nightmare because I have to upload the entire site, about 1.5 GB of data. Do you have any idea how long it takes to upload a website that large at 512 kbps? If you’re lucky, maybe as little as 8 hours.

I said that Canada’s three major cable companies are Rogers, Cogeco, and Shaw. I deliberately left out the fourth option: Videotron. Only available in Quebec and the Franco-Ontarien region immediately east of Ottawa, including Rockland, Videotron isn’t like the other three. Rogers, Cogeco, and Shaw are basically interchangeable in terms of services, prices, and philosophy. Videotron, on the other hand, has decided to let Quebecers experience a bit of Europe on our side of the Atlantic. They made a major announcement a few months ago, saying that they would be the first in North America to support 100 Mbps internet speeds! Actually, they stated that, in practice, they would limit their marketing to 50 Mbps because there didn’t seem to be any websites that could actually communicate at 100 Mbps. In other words, their service is so fast that you would never actually achieve the the claimed 100 Mbps speeds, which might cause some negative feedback from customers.

So, here’s Videotron.

Videotron

The first thing you’ll notice about Videotron’s is that they offer only two types of internet service: ridiculously expensive and Basic.

Basic competes with Essential and Ultra Lite, except that offers one quarter the upload speed of the former and half the upload speed of the latter. If you thought Rogers’ $5 per GB overage cost was predatory, check out Videotron’s $7.95!

It’s interesting — actually baffling — that Videotron doesn’t have a service that competes Essential Plus/Lite. High-Speed competes with Performance and Express, with an upload speed that falls between the two, but with triple the cost per additional GB of bandwidth. Plus it’s also way more expensive. I guess “competes” wasn’t really the right word here.

Extreme, shall we say, matches up with Max 10 from Bell and Hi-Speed Extreme from Rogers. It’s a lot more expensive but, let’s face it, nobody really subscribes to those services anyway.

Extreme Plus is actually competitive at first glance. It’s less expensive than Max 16 and Hi-Speed Extreme Plus, and it’s faster, but it comes with a 30 GB bandwidth limit and costs $7.95 per extra GB! 20 Mbps with a 30 GB limit? At 20 Mbps, you would reach your 30 GB limit in a mere 200 minutes! That’s right folks: downloading at 2.25 MBps will hit 30 GB in 3 hours and 20 minutes. Thereafter you’ll be charged $7.95 every 7.5 minutes, or $64.40 per hour. I don’t know anyone who would be able to afford this service. I have no idea what the point of this service is.

Here’s where things get interesting: Videotron has two services that are faster than anything that any of their competitors offer, and they’re priced the same as the Extreme and Extreme Plus services. Ultra 30 is the same price as Extreme, except that it’s three time faster. 30 Mbps for $74.95 per month is actually a good value (other than the disappointing 70 GB cap), especially considering that Bell charges $91.90 per month for 16 Mbps (remember that the modem rental can’t be avoided, so it’s a mandatory fee) and Rogers charges $99.95 per month for 18 Mbps. The price falls between Bell’s Max 10 and Max 16 services, and between Rogers’ Extreme and Extreme Plus services. In terms of price, it’s actually the Ultra 50 service that competes with Max 16/Extreme Plus. Ultra 50, at $89.95 per month, is cheaper than Max 16 and Extreme Plus despite being four times faster!

So, given that Ultra 50 is the same price as Extreme Plus despite being more than twice as fast and having more than three times the bandwidth cap, and given that Ultra 30 is is the same price as Extreme despite being three times as fast, why would anyone pay for Extreme and Extreme Plus? Because Ultra 30 and Ultra 50 aren’t available everywhere. Videotron’s fastest and second fastest service are the same price no matter where you live, but it’s three times faster for some people than others. I call that screwing your customers. Extreme Plus and Extreme should be price competitive with the same tiers from Bell and Rogers. Charging rates that high while other companies provide those speeds for considerably less money, and while other customers with the same service provider get triple the speed for the same price, is just an outrageous example of price gouging. And that’s how a monopoly works.

The amazing thing, once again, is that Videotron’s internet service maxes out at 1 Mbps upload. While Videotron is the only internet provider in Canada to offer 50 Mbps download speeds, and Verizon’s FiOS is the only 50 Mbps service in the United States, Canadian internet has a maximum upload speed of 1 Mbps no matter where you live. FiOS comes in 10/2 Mbps, 20/5 Mbps, 20/20 Mbps and 50/20 Mbps speeds. Even FiOS’s slowest download service is twice as fast as Canada’s fastest service, and for as little as $64.99 per month you can upload data 20 times faster on FiOS as you can in Canada. Here’s the embarrassing comparison chart.

Verizon FiOS

Pretty sad, isn’t it? Although those prices are in American dollars, all tiers are certainly cheaper than tiers with the same download speed in Canada, and the upload speeds range from 2 to 50 times faster. The notable exception is the FiOS Fastest service, at a whopping $144.95 per month. Considering that $89.95 per month will get you 50 Mbps in Quebec, Videotron appears to win that battle, other than being 50 times slower for uploads. Frankly, I would love to be able to upload at 2 or 5 Mbps — speeds totally unheard of in this country — so the cheaper services from Verizon would suit me just fine.

Sadly, FiOS isn’t available in all markets in the United States, but where it exists, it scares its competitors to death. 20 and 50 Mbps internet will become widely available in the United States someday, so is that a hopeful sign for Canada? No. Bell and Rogers/Cogeco/Shaw couldn’t care less that you can download 4 times faster and upload 50 times faster by crossing the border. The cable companies don’t need to compete with other jurisdictions, and Bell apparently feels no need to compete with Videotron’s Ultra 30 and Ultra 50 services. Canada exists in a bubble, and while Japan, Europe, the United States, and pretty much every other wealthy country in the world move to ever faster internet speeds, Canadians watch the rest of the world leave them behind, while Canadian internet providers argue that they need “traffic shaping” to make Canada’s slow internet service even slower in order for them to make a profit. I’m pretty sure that Verizon, and the hundreds of internet providers in Europe and Japan are making a profit! But the CRTC and Canadian politicians and customers may be gullible enough to believe that internet service has to be slow, and has to be throttled even slower during peak hours, in order for greedy internet providers to make any money. How sad.

Like most people, I have a huge bookshelf of books that I only read once and will probably never read again. We hold onto them like trophies, unwilling to destroy them or give them away, which is understandable considering how much we paid for them. Pocket books for $10, soft covers for $20, hard covers for $60… what’s going on here? Why is a soft cover book $20 when you buy it at a bookstore, and 50 cents when you sell it at a garage sale the next summer? People are only willing to pay 25 to 50 cents for books at a garage sale, so that’s what a used book is worth. From $25 to 25 cents, that means that books depreciate by 99% as soon as you take them out of the store. Am I the only one who has a problem with this?

Of course, the bookstore sometimes gets rid of their unsold or damaged overstock for up to 90% off, so obviously the profit margin on books is pretty high. How much do you suppose it actually costs to make a book, from the cost of materials and production to the expense of transporting it to the store. Probably no more than a dollar, right? The markup on books is huge. What’s especially galling is that huge row of “Classics” for $9.99, where publishers reprint books that have fallen into the public domain and charge almost as much for them as new books! The profit margin on a book whose author didn’t have to be paid is nearly 100%!

That’s why it boggles my mind that people still buy books. For well over a century we’ve had a useful service call the library! Why would anyone pay for books when they could borrow them for free? And that realization is what got me back into reading a few months ago. I hadn’t been to a library in almost a decade!

My local library is large, but they often don’t have the books I want, but they’re available at other libraries in the city. I simply ask for a copy and it gets sent to my local library for free. I live in a metropolis of over a million people with well over a dozen libraries, and yet some of the books I wanted to read weren’t available anywhere in my local library system. For those books, I’ve requested an interlibrary loan, and amazingly those books have been sent from other parts of the province to my library, once again for free. It takes longer to get a book that way, and you can’t borrow it for as long. I really enjoyed one of the books that I read and I would like to read it again, but I don’t want to wait for it to arrive from some distant corner of the country. A surprising thought came to my head: I should buy this book!

So, here’s my philosophy on book buying. You should only buy a book if you absolutely, positively will read it again and again. That means that your personal library should have only a small selection of your all-time favourite books. Every other book should be borrowed from the library. You shouldn’t have a wall full of books!

Actually, I propose something even more radical than that: you shouldn’t have any books at all. Let’s face it, books are expensive, they take up a lot of space, and they have no resale value. Why on earth are we still buying them? I had high hopes that books would disappear when the eBook appeared more than a decade ago, but reading books on my computer screen was no fun at all. I have to sit at my computer to read an eBook, which prevents me from reading in the only two situations where I ever have the desire to read a book: lying in my warm, comfy bed; and when I’m at work, either because I arrived at work early and have some time before my shift, or if I’m waiting for a ride after work. My computer can’t do those things.

Oh, but there are notebook computers now, right? Notebooks don’t help because they have to sit on your lap, but I want to recline in my bed and hold the book in the air. They’re also too large to conveniently pull out of my bag while I’m sitting at my desk or in the lobby. Besides which, they still have the second major problem with reading books on your computer: the computer screen.

I hate reading book on a computer screen. Despite wonderful innovations like ClearType, which makes fonts look smoother, computer screens just don’t look as nice as printed pages. Whether I have to sit at my computer to read a book, which I don’t like to do, or whether I have to carry a (relatively) big, heavy notebook computer, they can’t compete with the print quality, ease and convenience of a real book. Books are small, weigh practically nothing, and they have printed pages. As the librarian asked me when I talked to her about eBooks, “Why would anyone want to read a book on a computer?”

So, a few years ago I started hearing about eInk. The concept is that science can now produce an LCD screen that can produce text that is as crisp and clear as a printed page, and put it in a device that’s about the size and weight of a real book. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it! Then, along came Amazon (who else?) with the Kindle, an eInk reader that could hold 200 books. Now the Kindle 2 is out, and it’s faster, lighter, displays 16 shades of grey (up from 4), and has enough memory to hold about 1500 books (2 GB). Is it time for books to disappear? I say yes!

Bear in mind that I haven’t actually used this thing. I’m reviewing the concept rather than the actual product. Practically speaking, how awesome would it be to be able to buy as many books as I want, but never have to store them on a bookshelf (or even own a bookshelf), and I can take my entire library with me wherever I go? Not only that, but we could save millions of trees. Pretty sweet, huh? Plus, Amazon sells Kindle books for less than regular books, which is only fair since an electronic book has no material or shipping costs. Assuming that the Kindle and its competitors actually do take over the world, eBooks had better remain cheaper than physical books for exactly those reasons. I understand the concept of paying for convenience, but there’s no way that I’m paying more for a bunch of 0s and 1s as I do for an actual book made from an actual tree.

So those are the pros, but what about the cons? My first question is whether or not the Kindle is going to be an open standard, or if it will support open standards. This is essential so that you can download books from sources other than Amazon. I’m not talking about piracy or copyright infringement, here. Remember what I said about books that are in the public domain?

Google is reportedly trying to archive every major literary work to ever fall into the public domain. Publishers are furious, because it will destroy an entire market for them. But really, why should anyone have to pay for the works of Shakespeare or Homer any more? As a supporter of the shareware concept, I understand paying a nominal fee for the disk that someone else’s software came on, so I can understand paying for the material cost of producing a book with someone else’s words on them. That means, I’ll pay for the paper and the ink. Publishers who reprint classic literary works have not had to pay an author, so the words are free. The author is long dead, so they don’t need to be paid royalties any more. Google has every right to make the classic works of literature available for free online, and when they do, I want to be able to download them into my Kindle so that I can read them like a book instead of staring at my computer screen. Will Amazon allow that? Seeing as how they sell copies of books that are in the public domain, I’m understandably skeptical.

If Amazon would allow me to put literary works that are in the public domain into my Kindle for free, in addition to letting my new books at a discount, there is no question that I would buy this thing. Like most people, I’ve promised myself that I would read the classics, but at $10 per book, that’s just not going to happen. Maybe I’ll get around to borrowing them at the library some day, but I’m certainly not going to spend hundreds of dollars to read the classics. Being able to read them for free could lead to an unprecedented revival of those books. It could be a literary revolution! So the question is, does Amazon want to be a part of that or not? Because I guarantee that if they won’t, some competitor will!

So, I close by saying that I believe the time has come for Kindle, or its future competitors, to replace the printed word. I hope that they will replace physical books in schools, and in society as a whole, sooner rather than later. I recommend buying the new Kindle, to the maximum extent that I can having never actually used the product. And so that no one can accuse me of writing this article to conceal an advertisement, I’ll come right out and say that I’ll get a 10% commission if you click this link to buy a Kindle. I honestly intend to buy one myself as soon as I’ve earned enough credits in my Amazon affiliate account.

We all know that it’s frustratingly hard to get good customer service from service providers. The telephone company, the cable company, that company that you bought your motherboard from; the list goes on and on. Then there are the companies that use deceptive marketing to convince you to buy something, and then it turns out that the product is totally unsupported. There is a lot of bad customer service out there, and I’ve always believed that consumers have a right to fight back.

Let me start by saying that you should never do anything illegal. No matter what a company has done to you, you don’t have a right vandalize or sabotage them. If you’re going to go public with your complaints, state only the facts, otherwise it’s defamation or libel. Also, be sure that you have evidence to defend your claims, because big corporations can and do sue for libel when customers dare to tell the truth about them.

Customers have the right to tell the truth about companies that have ripped them off, and you can be creative about how and where you tell the truth. Tell the truth in the store, loudly but without yelling, so that other customers can overhear you. Write to the consumer advocate at your local newspaper or news channel. Post in their forum, or the forum of a popular fan site. Blog about it. Start a petition. Spread the word, but do it legally!

So, I’ve received some spectacularly bad service from three different companies in the past few days, but I’m going to write about one that may not seem like such a big deal. You see, I like pudding. Try to guess where this is going.

In March I bought a bunch of Hunt’s Snack Pack 4-packs, and I was pleasantly surprised to find an instruction card inside offering me a free music download from Puretracks. Good deal, right! I went to the website, entered my unique download code, and received an email presenting my Serial number and PIN. I created an account on Puretracks and got a free download for signing up! So I had two free songs to choose from. I like to pick obscure songs that I’m not likely to find in stores, and ended up settling on My Uncle Used to Love Me But She Died by Roger Miller because he sang it on the Muppet Show when I was a child, and u.f.o. rosie by Weeping Tile because it has a cool music video that they used to play on SPACE, a science fiction channel here in Canada.

That turned out to be a good deal for me, and a few weeks ago I had a hankering for some pudding and free music, so I bought some more pudding from Hunt’s when I went to the grocery store. This time I was thinking of downloading something from Malvina Reynolds, the wonderful jazz, folk and protest singer who was a ’60s radical when she was in her 60s! Her album for the young, Magical Songs, released in 1978 shortly after her death at the age of 78, inspired me as a youth, and her other songs inspire me as an adult. I was also considering An Old Fashioned Love Song by Paul Williams because, once again, he sang it on The Muppet Show when I was young.

So, once again, I found a card for a free download inside two of the packs. I went to the site, entered my unique download codes, and received two emails with my offer codes. Here’s a copy of the email response, with the codes changed.

Below you will find the serial number and the pin code so you can download 1 free music download.

Serial Number: 1234567
PIN: 1234567890

It is very important that you keep your PIN and serial number in a safe place. You can’t redeem your free download without them! They will be used upon check-out instead of a credit card.

Instructions:

1. Please visit www.puretracks.com
2. Browse for your track and select “Add to Cart”. When finished shopping, select “Checkout”.
3. Fill out short registration form. If you are already registered, enter e-mail address and password.
4. Click on “Prepaid Cards, Promotional Codes & Gift Cards”. Enter your Serial # and your PIN code.
5. Click on “Submit” and follow the on-screen instructions to download your music.
6. A confirmation email will be sent to your account containing your download details.

*Download must be used by October 1, 2008. Controls are in place and will not allow any user to download content that has been designated by Puretracks’ music providers as containing explicit content.

Well, I’m no dummy. I’ve been a consumer for a long time now, and I know that almost all promotions have a deadline. I carefully read the entire card before I even bothered to visit the website, and thankfully there was no expiry date on the offer. I’ve read the small print, and all of the legalese everywhere on the card. This offer does not expire! Without an expiry date, my code is good forever. A contract cannot be amended without the consent of both parties, so Puretracks is legally obligated to honour their contractual obligations and render a free song to me for every valid download code I provide them.

How many do I have? At least two so far, and possibly more once I eat the rest of the pudding. I went back and looked at the email I received the first time I entered a code and, indeed, it told me to download my music by September 17, 2008, which was easy to do since it was March. I’m still trying to figure out why pudding purchased in late November would have an offer that expired in October. Maybe it’s just an error? But I tried using the codes, and they didn’t work. They really have expired. But they can’t legally expire the code, because the terms and conditions on the card don’t have an expiry date!

Well, I’m confused. I’m also annoyed. Now, you may ask yourself, is it really worth getting upset over $1.98 worth of free downloads? Perhaps not, but it gave me a great opportunity to write on the subject of consumer vigilantism in a situation that might also get a laugh. Yes folks, this is an entire post about my outrage over not getting free songs that I earned by eating pudding.

I’ve written to Puretracks’ customer service department to let them know that they sent me a code that’s been expired for two and a half months, and that they have no right to refuse to honour their promotion code because they failed to put an expiry date on the instruction card. The card doesn’t even instruct the bearer to go to their website for full rules and regulations. It clearly states that I can download any song, excluding any tracks that are labelled with Parental Advisory: Explicit Content. Since the card failed to indicate that there are any other rules, those are the full rules of the promotion, and they need to honour the conditions of their contract. If they failed to place further conditions in the contract, and failed to indicate that further conditions existed on the promotion’s website, that is an unfortunate oversight on their part. It legally obligates them to honour these cards forever, though in reality, it’s unlikely that anyone will try to claim their free download a hundred years from now. This whole thing will likely blow over in a few months or years. Live and learn, Puretracks, and have a little chat with your legal department about their mistake!

In conclusion, I’d like to talk about one final form of consumer vigilantism that I strongly believe in: encourage everyone you know to write, phone or email the company providing bad customer service and demand that they change their ways. I know it’s hard to convince people to spend their time fighting for a cause that they may not feel strongly about. This cause has the novelty of having a funny subject: pudding! Tell your friends to join the Pudding Protest and send an email to customerservice@puretracks.com demanding that Puretracks honour their contract with pudding purchasers and give them a free download when they enter their code. Pudding Power!

The news item that so amazed me was this: Movie Studios Sue DVD-Copying Software Maker. Less than a week later, this headline followed: RealNetworks Forced to Stop Sales of RealDVD. The MPAA’s position that “making a copy is stealing a copy” should be well known, but what I found amazing was that the industry had turned on one of their own, RealNetworks, makers of RealPlayer and the legal online music service Rhapsody. Suing Real is like suing Apple! This is a big deal. I really can’t believe it.

Now, I have no love for RealNetworks. I stopped using RealPlayer years ago because I was tired of the ads, the way it inserted itself into my computer’s startup sequence without asking me, and generally acted like malware. Of course, Sony’s root kit opened a backdoor that allowed root access to anyone aware of the rootkit’s installation, compromising the integrity of the Windows operating system to such an extent that one U.S. senator called it a threat to the national security of the United States!

So I have no great love for RealNetworks, but at least they’re not as bad as Apple, who used DRM to use their iTunes monopoly to give their iPods a monopoly, or Sony who infected their customers computers and endangered the security of every nation in the world! No, unlike the small fry that the MPAA has gone after in the past, RealNetworks is a huge company that creates only legal products, some of which are from the industry that the MPAA supposedly represents. Their large library of legal products includes RealDVD, a program that lets you create a legal backup of your legally purchased DVDs.

Oh, did I say that backing up your DVDs is legal? The MPAA disagrees, and that’s why they’ve taken RealNetworks to court to prevent the sale of RealDVD. Unfortunately for consumers, if anyone is breaking the law here, it’s the MPAA. Allow me to make my case.

When I was a child, I remember seeing a notice at the back of instruction manuals that came with my Nintendo games that said that making backups of NES cartridges was neither legal nor necessary. They were certainly right about the latter: a cartridge filled with ROM chips is virtually indestructible. The contacts sometimes become unreliable, which can easily be fixed by cleaning them, but the ROM chips inside can only be destroyed by a massive surge of electricity — which would also destroy your Nintendo — or by deliberately using considerable force to break them, such as hitting them with a sledgehammer. Nintendo could legitimately claim that backing up their games was unnecessary, and the law agreed.

With computers, it was a different story. Backing up floppy disks was essential because they were made of flimsy circular sheets of plastic with a magnetic coating applied them, and they frequently developed bad sectors and became unreadable during normal use. Even hard drives frequently developed bad sectors during normal use in those days, and the motor could only be expected to last for about 5 years. While inexpensive, those methods of storage frequently failed, and making backups of your installation disks and important files was simply part of the culture of owning a computer. Not so with cartridge-based games.

Although cassette tapes were quite popular during my childhood, we still had a record player and mostly bought LPs. You had to be very careful about touching the surface of the record, and very careful not to scratch the record when you lifted the needle. One day I saw a commercial where a dog picked up a CD in its mouth and its owner fought to pull it away from him. He then put the CD into his CD player and it played perfectly. The ad’s narrator informed us that CDs could survive this kind of punishment, which would be impossible with a record.

The ad, of course, was lying. CDs are notoriously easy to scratch, no matter how careful you are with them. This can be an annoyance if it causes your songs to skip, but it can be disastrous if a single sector becomes unreadable on a CD-ROM. The fragile nature of computer files is that they are an all or nothing medium. When you copy data from a CD-ROM, if any file fails its integrity check, that file is useless. If it happens to be a critical file, your application or game won’t work. I’ve never felt the need to be as careful with my floppy disks as I do with my CDs and DVDs, carefully removing them from the spindle and holding them at the edge or with a finger through the hole, ensuring that the disc never touches anything besides the jewel case or the tray.

My futile attempts to prevent my CDs and DVDs from scratching force me to be more careful with my optical discs than I’ve ever had to be with any other medium I’ve used, including records, casette tapes, floppy disks and hard drives. I dread to place them on a table or on top of the TV or DVD player. Although they never touch anything but the jewel case or the tray, they always get scratched anyway. I have a couple of theories about this.

When a CD or DVD is placed in CD/DVD player or into the optical drive on your computer, a wheel-shaped thing rises and presses the disc against a wheel at the top of the drive. Once secured, the disc can spin at up to 10 000 rpm without coming loose. When you press the eject button, the wheel lowers the disc back onto the tray. Is it possible that the wheel spins slightly as it retracts, scratching the disc against the tray? The only other possibility is that the disc moves slightly when I gently place it on the tray or snap it back into the jewel case. In any event, there’s absolutely no excuse for the disc scratching for either of these reasons. With thoroughly, obsessively cautious use, every disc I own eventually develops a visible scratch, and sometimes that makes a portion of the disc unplayable.

Do you get what I’m saying here? Unlike records, casette tapes, floppy disks or hard drives, every optical disc will eventually become partially unreadable through normal, cautious, responsible use. CDs and DVDs are the most fragile storage medium ever!!! If you want to protect your investment, you absolutely must create backups of your CDs and DVDs. The MPAA wants doing so to be illegal. Why do you suppose that is?

It’s obvious to me that piracy isn’t the issue here. The MPAA wants to prevent you from making backups of your DVDs so that you’ll have to replace them when they get scratched! They know perfectly well that their product becomes unreadable through normal, responsible use, and they’re counting on that to drive future sales. Perhaps you think I’m a conspiracy nut for saying this. I wouldn’t say it if I couldn’t support my argument.

Somewhere between 5 and 10 years ago, I first started reading about CDs that had “armor”. They were made out of an especially hard plastic that was supposed to be virtually scratchproof. Reliable websites tested these claims by attempting to scratch them with everything from erasers to steel wool. While it was still possible to scratch them deliberately, their finding was that it was virtually impossible to scratch them accidentally. That’s all that should be required. Mission accomplished!

So, if the technology exists to make DVDs unscratchable and the movie labels are choosing not to use it, and also oppose the right of consumers to make backups of their fragile discs, what conclusion can one come to other than that they want your discs to fail and have to be replaced? If they used armor DVDs, they could make the same claim that Nintendo made back in 1985: backing up your DVDs is unnecessary because there is no reason for them to fail with responsible use. DVD makers choose not to employ an existing technology to make their discs scratch resistant, so they forfeit their right to say that consumers have no legitimate right to backup their discs.

The MPAA’s claim that consumers don’t have a right to backup their discs becomes even flimsier with recent developments. Today, you can buy a scratchproof DVD-R from TDK. They use a material called durabis (Latin for “you will last”). TDK claims that it is tough enough to resist screwdriver damage and make scratched optical discs a thing of the past. The interesting part is the reason why it was developed. One of the reasons why Blu-Ray discs have a higher capacity than HD-DVD is because the recording layer is much closer to the surface of the disc. Blu-ray discs are inherently more susceptible to becoming unreadable because a much finer scratch could render part of the disc unreadable. To prevent the discs from failing en masse, the Blu-ray format actually mandates the use of a scratch-resistant coating! Besides TDK, Sony and Panasonic have their own hard coating polymers to protect Blu-Ray discs.

In essence, the Blu-ray Disc Association has admitted that the plastic in CDs and DVDs scratches so easily that Blu-ray discs would become unreadable unless they were made of harder plastic. While the MPAA can argue that CDs and DVDs require more damage to become unreadable, they can’t deny that the discs are highly susceptible to scratches. If Blu-ray discs needs this coating, so do CDs and DVDs. If the industry won’t switch on their own, then consumers have an unchallengeable right to protect their investment by backing up their discs.

One way or another, the movie and music industries are absolutely aware that they’re selling a defective product. Their discs are so fragile that they become unreadable during responsible use, and that alone should leave them fearful of a multi-billion dollar class action lawsuit. The lawsuit aside, for as long as their product continues to be defective, consumers have an inalienable right to protect their legally purchased music, movies and games by making a backup. Have a problem with that, MPAA? Then fix your &@^!ing product!!!

Now, for the record, I’m not a video game master. I still find it difficult to beat World 8 of Super Mario Bros., and there are lots of games that I have never beaten, and never will. You know that friend you have who just kicks ass at video games and can beat any game that you’ve ever seen him play? That’s not me.

That said, I’ve been playing video games for over 20 years, so I don’t suck at them. Eye hand coordination and reflexes have never been a problem for me. I expect everyone else to be better than me at any game that I don’t own, and I expect to be better than them at any game that I own and they don’t. Do you get what I’m saying here? I’m a remarkably average veteran video game player.

Not long ago, the AVGN finally relented and reviewed Superman 64. In the emails he put in his previous video, people were mentioning the game in the same sentence as E.T. for Atari 2600. That game is the worst game ever, so Superman 64 must really suck!

So, the AVGN starts his review and talks about how hard it is to fly through the rings. I finally decided to play the game about 10 minutes ago to see if it was really as bad as he says. Um… he had trouble with the rings?

I mean, okay, I ran out of time the first time because it took me a while to figure out that B makes you fly. After that, I just cautiously flew through the rings without any trouble. The control is a bit sensitive, but the N64 controller’s joystick is even more sensitive. I mastered the art of controlling tiny degrees of tilt while playing Super Mario 64 (the first game that came out), and I mastered flying through rings with an N64 controller when Star Fox 64 came out. I can make the tiny adjustments to keep Superman on course very easily, and when I’m off target, I just let go of the gas to give me the time to correct my aim. Within a minute, I was flying through rings with no trouble at all. It’s so easy, I was just astonished that anyone who has been playing video games for as long as the AVGN would struggle with it.

It’s true that you can only miss three rings, but who cares? I rarely miss any, and if I accidentally miss one, I just move on to the next one. You’re allowed to miss a few! I beat every ring level with 30 seconds to spare. The ring levels just aren’t difficult. Period.

So, after the first ring level, I definitely wouldn’t have known what to do if I hadn’t seen AVGN’s review. You have to pick up both cars and toss them away. Since I knew that, I finished the level on the first attempt. Then I started the second ring level, but I was standing on the ground and it took me a while to figure out that you have to press Z to start (and stop) flying.

So, I beat another easy ring level, and then I had to pick up another car. Of course, I assumed that you’re supposed to toss the car, but this time you’re supposed to protect it and bring it to the finish line. Oops. Oh well, I completed it on the second attempt. The first time I played the third ring level, I went the wrong way and went over my miss limit. That was when I noticed that there’s an arrow that shows you which way to go in the bottom right corner of the screen, and navigating was never a problem again.

After the third ring level, you have to beat up four guys on a rooftop. I can only assume that AVGN gave up before he got this far, because he had asked if Superman ever gets to use his awkward punching action. They all go down with one hit (they should!), and then there’s another easy ring level. The ring levels are incredibly easy. The levels between the ring levels are the ones that take some skill.

So, now I’m asked to blow away three tornadoes with my ice breath. There’s a tiny ice breath power-up at one point in the level. Why the hell do I need a power-up? This is one of Superman’s basic skills! The ice breath power-up is really small — MUCH smaller than those giant rings — so you have to fly really slowly to grab it. Once you do grab it, you have a graph that looks like it’s powering down for about three seconds, which I thought meant that it had run out, but it was actually powering up! So, I couldn’t figure out how to make him use his ice breath in the first few tries, so I gave up. Then I came back to the game and noticed that, when you pause the game, there’s an option to read the story and learn the controls. Ice breath is C up. This is a clear case of what we computer technicians call RTFM: Read The *@#&ing Manual! Sadly, when you buy a game secondhand, there usually isn’t a manual, but newer games like N64 games often have instructions within the game. So that was my mistake. Once you know what the buttons do, blowing out the tornadoes is yet another easy task. All of the levels are easy, but they’re so pointless and boring.

After one more turn through the rings, I finished the level and was given the option to save my game. The second level starts Superman off in some kind of facility, and I have to walk through rooms and beat up a couple of robots. Eventually I get a passcode for the canal which I’m supposed to use on the computer. Which computer? There’s a computer on every wall in the level! You know what? I don’t even care. This isn’t a Superman game. I can’t find the energy to care any more.

So, I’m confused. Am I just really good at this game, or is the Angry Video Game Nerd not very good at video games? I realize that he’s playing a character, and his job is to exaggerate the negative aspects of the games he reviews. There’s a section on his FAQ called “That game’s not that bad, you’re whining about it, just because you suck at it!“. His response:

Remember this is for comedy. Sure my gripes with the games stem from truth, but they are exaggerated. The whole point is to play bad. If you want to see somebody play good, go watch a speed run. If you take my reviews seriously, you are missing the whole point. Think for yourself. I may actually like some of the games I’m complaining about. I only focus on the negative. Some of my complaints may be legit and others far fetched. To this day, I still get long winded emails bitching about my Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest review, describing every last detail why they disagree with my video. Meanwhile, I’m just laughing my ass off. It was just a quick little video I made one night when I was bored, just for a little joke, and there’s real “Angry Nerd’s” getting mad about it, which is sad, pathetic and hilarious! The same people probably believe that I go around in real life, wearing a white pressed shirt, stuffed with pens in the pocket, and saying “fuck” all the time and talking about buffallos taking diarrhea dumps.

So of course, I know that he’s exaggerating about how awkward the flying is, and he’s absolutely right about how boring and repetitive the levels are. The game is notorious, after all. Still, to be funny to someone who remembers the game, he has to hit on the right points and gripe about the right things. He went on and on about how hard it is to complete the ring levels within the time limit, and showed himself missing too many rings over and over again. That has never happened to me, so it probably hasn’t happened to anyone else who played the game. Learning to fly took all of 60 seconds, and I can breeze through all of the rings with 30 seconds to spare, so why can’t he? If he can, and he knows that everyone else can, why spend so much time talking about it? Far be it from me to tell the AVGN what’s funny, but if your complaint doesn’t have at least a certain amount of truth to it, it’s not that funny. Well, maybe if it’s funny in an ironic way, like when a standup comic complains about something that nobody hates, like chocolate or democracy or pizza. But this doesn’t sound like an ironic rant. James Rolfe (the man who plays the AVGN) seems to really think that he’s complaining about something that was a major frustration to players, and I don’t think he’s right.

Now, everyone makes mistakes, so I certainly forgive him if he miscalculated on this particular rant, but actually, maybe there is an explanation. I assume that the AVGN uses emulators to record his video game clips (as opposed to pointing a video camera at a television), so he was probably using some other controller with his N64 emulator. I have an Adaptoid, so I play N64 games with a real N64 controller. The level of precision needed for any N64 flying game would make flying almost impossible without an analog control stick. The N64 joystick is incredibly sensitive, measuring 360 degrees of angle and a single percentage point of tilt. If you use a real N64 controller, flying is a piece of cake.

Anyway, he’s not wrong that this game is bad. Yes, you sometimes get stuck in walls, but you can easily get out by pressing Z. Still, that shouldn’t happen. The levels are boring and they certainly aren’t fun. In the first level, every stage alternates between an easy ring stage, and then a short stage where you have to pick up cars, or beat up bad guys, or blow away those stupid tornadoes. Are there any levels in this game that are fun? If there are, I’ll never know.

Anyway, this game definitely sucks, but it’s also definitely not hard. In fact, the stages are insultingly easy once you learn the controls, which I could have done right away just by reading the instructions. I think the AVGN missed the mark on this one, and I just felt like I should defend this horrible game for some reason. So now I have. And now we can all go back to enjoying the AVGN’s videos with no hard feelings.

Quotation from James Rolfe is © 2008 The Cinemassacre Productions

The day after I wrote that post, an article appeared in the Ottawa Citizen about Industry Minister Jim Prentice’s demand that Bell and Telus explain why they will be charging 15 cents per incoming text message. I had estimated that an average text message is about 100 bytes of data, therefor the bandwidth required to handle the entire country’s text messages is about 4.2 GB, or roughly the bandwidth that I’m allowed to use per day with my 7 megabit “high speed” internet access, for which I pay $1.60 per day. My ISP apparently makes a profit on that $1.60 a day, so surely I must be horribly incorrect in my estimate of Canada’s text messaging bandwidth if Bell and Telus expect to be paid 15 cents for each of those 45 million messages per day, or $6.75 million. But, there it is on page A10.

Wireless technology expert Ken Chase said he doesn’t accept the rationale from Bell and Telus that the volume of text messages places great demands on the networks. The consultant with the Toronto-based firm Heavy Computing said that while 45.3 million text messages sounds like a lot, the amount of space this takes up on a network is related costs to a telecom company are miniscule.

A text message sent via mobile phone can be no more than 160 characters, and each character is about a byte. If 45 million text messages are sent throughout Canada every day and each message is about 100 characters, this totals 4.5 gigabytes.

Source: Ottawa Citizen, July 10, 2008

So, there you have it. I said 4.2 GB, and wireless technology expert Ken Chase says 4.5 GB. I couldn’t have been much closer than that, could I? It’s simply a fact that text messages cost telecom companies almost nothing, and the idea of charging people any amount for receiving them, especially spam, is outrageous. Bravo to Mr. Chase, and the Ottawa Citizen, for drawing the public’s attention to this nonsense.

Also, the same day that I wrote that post, which was critical of Rogers for charging $60 to $150 per month for the iPhone, Rogers bowed to public pressure and lowered the price! Rogers will now offer a $30 per month plan with a 6 GB bandwidth limit. Voice plans start at $20 per month, and the system access fee is $6.95 a month, so you can now have a 3G iPhone with 6 GB of bandwidth for as little as $56.95 per month, plus tax. There’s still no unlimited option, but at least 6 GB is a reasonable amount of data, and it will allow the iPhone to be used as Apple intended: to surf the internet and watch movies and listen to music. Don’t get too excited, though. The offer expires on August 31.

What’s interesting is that, even with the lower rates, Canada is still the second most expensive country in the world to own an iPhone.

Despite the better prices and service terms temporarily being offered by Rogers Communications Inc. for Apple Inc.’s iPhone 3G, Canadians will still be paying nearly the highest overall cost for the device in the world.

Rogers announced its new rates on Wednesday but has not yet published them on its website.

According to CBCNews.ca’s iPhone iNdex, which compares basic service plans from the 27 carriers in 21 countries that have announced pricing for the device’s launch on Friday, Canadians who buy the device before Aug. 31 will be faced with a total minimum cost of $2,176 US over the course of the three-year deal they must sign with Rogers. That is second only to the $2,554 US customers of Vodafone will pay in Italy with their two-year service agreement.

Source: CBC.ca, July 10, 2008 Link

You know, I could own and operate a car for three years for $2176. It would probably have to be at least 15 years old, and it would have to be small enough to have very low fuel consumption, and I wouldn’t be able to go on long road trips. Oh, right, then there’s insurance. Okay, maybe three years is a bit of a stretch, but you see my point. If you’re a young person, would you rather have an iPhone or a car? The choice is yours.

Anyway, Canadians aren’t the only ones who are fighting to get out of the technology Third World. The battle is also heating up in the United States where, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin wants to take action against Comcast for interfering with web traffic such as BitTorrent downloads.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin, staking out new regulatory ground on the Internet, said yesterday that he would seek an enforcement action against Comcast Corp. for slowing down heavy Internet users who were downloading movies and other large data files.

The Philadelphia company used “too blunt an instrument” in managing its network and didn’t adequately disclose its bandwidth restrictions to subscribers, Martin said. “You can’t limit consumers that way.”

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer, July 10, 2008

The FCC is finally standing up for net neutrality in the United States, while the debate has barely begun in Canada. At least Google threw its weight behind the pro-neutrality side. I can only hope that Canada manages to prevent ISPs from arbitrarily deciding which applications and services get to have bandwidth and which ones don’t. Where do we live, Communist China? Yes, I know, I lose respect for almost any argument when someone compares this land of the free to a Communist dictatorship, but I stand by this analogy. China has censors who decide what websites its citizens are allowed to visit, and this is essentially the same thing. Bell thinks that it has the right to decide what you can and can’t do with the internet, and that’s an idea that is so far divorced from reality that it could scarcely have been proposed in a nation like ours. That is exactly the kind of heavy-handed control that China imposes on its citizens, and I won’t stand for it in this country.

So, the news is less bleak than it was. There’s a chance that Jim Prentice may be able to do something about the text messaging fees, net neutrality may yet come to North America, and the iPhone may someday become affordable in Canada.

We knew that there was supply because the Wii is currently outselling the PS3 and Xbox 360 combined, and yet the demand was obviously still greater than the supply because they simply couldn’t be found on store shelves. It’s quite something to be #1 by a large margin, and still be completely sold out of product. Demand may yet exceed supply again by Christmas, making the Wii impossible to find for a third Christmas in a row, but, for the first time ever, it’s possible to just walk into a store and buy a Wii. If you’re planning on buying one for Christmas, play it safe and buy one now.

Also, I made some phone calls today and got three more games liberated. I’ll update their status on the site once the authors send the files and licenses to my email. The formal announcement is expected on Tuesday.

I’ve spent almost no money this year as a result of unanticipated unemployment, but a local gentleman was selling some irreplaceable pieces of computer history recently, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to add them to my little archival museum.

He was selling an original IBM PC (the model 5150)! This is the first ever PC, the computer that all modern PCs are based on. It featured an Intel 8088 processor clocked at 4.77 MHz, a copy of BASIC written into ROM, a green monochrome monitor, two 5.25″ floppy drives, and no hard drive. Here it is.

It still works, and it was $120. I call that a great deal! I also purchased an Apple Macintosh 512K for $60. It has a built-in white monochrome monitor, a 3.5″ floppy drive, a mouse(!), and no hard drive. It features a Motorola 68000 processor clocked at 8 MHz, and was the second ever Macintosh computer, after the original Macintosh 128K. This baby came packed with 512K of RAM, hence the name. It was $60, another great deal.

He was such a nice guy that he threw in an old 8″ floppy disk for free. This one appears to be double sided, double density, meaning that it stored 980 KB when formatted with CP/M, and a whopping 1.2 MB when formatted with MS-DOS! That density debuted in 1977, the year before 360 KB 5.25″ floppy disks came out and took over the market. 1.2 MB 5.25″ floppy disks were introduced in 1982. How amazing is it that this ancient floppy disk format had the same capacity as the largest-ever 5.25″ floppy disks, and essentially the same capacity as the 3.5″ floppy disks that we still use today?

Anyway, check out my 8 inch floppy disk. Isn’t it shiny?

This thing is almost as big as the entire Macintosh 512K! You really couldn’t have put an 8″ floppy drive in one of these things.

I also bought four loose 8086 processors and 8088 processors, which is kind of neat. There was also a bunch of add-in cards for the Macintosh, including a card that had a Z80 processor that allowed you to run a copy of CP/M on a Mac. How cool is that?

Finally, I purchased a whole bunch of software over the weekend that I’m going to be reviewing soon. It will be fun.