Jason M. Hanley :: Custom Software Developer

I called Fido today to ask about data plans. The standard rate is 5 cents / KB = $51.20 / MB. To give you an idea, at mobile speeds (about twice the speed of a modem) you can download about 50 MB / hour. So downloading at full speed costs $2,560 / hour - plus tax. The best plan you can buy lets you pre-pay $100 / month for 200MB, and then $5 / MB thereafter — still about $250 / hour.

Fido used to have an unlimited data plan available. This was canceled shortly after Rogers purchased them. How much money did Rogers have to pay to bribe the competition bureau to approve that sale?

It seems like more and more people have been blogging and writing about this. Even the mainstream media is starting to wake up:

• Bell to charge you $3,600 per hour for Wireless Internet access
• Fido data comes down in price, $4000 now buys 1GB of data not 200MB
• Canadian cell phone rates are higher than Mexico

Call your MP today and ask them why the big three (Bell, Telus, Rogers) are continued to be allowed this monopoly.

Tom Purves has created a nice graph illustrating what I’ve suspected for a long time — that Canada’s wireless oligopolies are pricing services way out of line with what a competitive market would. Not only are data rates bad, but voice and long distance are more expensive than they should be as well.

Wireless providers are second only to the banking cartel in Canada for collusion and price-fixing. ISPs aren’t far behind.

Unfortunately our Conservative government isn’t going to be doing anything about this any time soon.

read more | digg story

Anyone who knows me has probably heard me go on about how good Gmail is. This will help put their spam filtering into perspective, however. Lately I’ve run into a lot of people that have trouble with either a) too much spam getting into their inbox, or b) overactive spam filters putting legitimate mail in their spam folder so they miss it.

Gmail’s spam filtering algorithm is amazing. My current spam folder is up over 2,100 messages now and growing. Gmail automatically deletes any spam older than 30 days, so that means it is filtering about 70 spams a day, compared to my 10-20 legitimate emails on my personal account. I hardly ever check my spam folder for legitimate emails, because the filtering is just that good. Over the course of a year, I’ve only had four or five “semi-legitimate” emails get mis-filtered. In all cases, they were from a company and had “spammy” advertising language in them. On the other side of things, spam messages only make it into my inbox once every couple of weeks. Out of 1,000 spam messages, less then one ever makes it to my inbox.

So my advice? If you’re drowning in spam, just get Gmail!

With blogs, mySpace, Facebook, and similar sites these days, there’s quite a bit of debate of how much personal information one should put on the Internet. Some have even suggested that anything posted to the Internet should be completely anonymous.

There’s certainly good reason to be careful. I think that some people forget that anything posted online is out there - public information, pretty much forever. Even if you take something down, odds are some cache or archiving system has already picked it up. Large corporations and individuals alike have found that out the hard way.

I have a good deal of personal information on my collection of sites, but most of it is related to my business or resume. I try not to put anything out there that could cause me grief later on.

Like most things, I think that putting personal information online is alright, as long as you do it intelligently, and think about the ramifications before you hit “upload.”