plonq | Change afoot

As it has become apparent that MTS does not plan to bring in any Android phones, and our contracts come up in a couple of months, we have decided that we are most likely going to be changing carriers at the end of summer. Our choices are a bit limited (Wind is not available here yet), so we are stuck with Rogers, Virgin, MTS, Telus, and a bunch of smaller companies who are basically just resellers for Rogers.

Unless they have some super secret plans that we don't know about, Rogers data packages are downright insulting. For just 120% of the price of the competition, they will give you 60% of the same data. Actually, that is the one thing that we will miss from MTS - they have unlimited data up to 10gb, then they throttle you past that. Virgin and Telus both offer fixed, and flexible data plans. The flexible plans will save you money if you don't use a lot of data in a month, but will end up costing you more if you end up using what you would hit in one of the fixed plans.

I think we have several of our old phone bills kicking around - and I may be able to get them on-line. We may need to look through our usage profiles and decide which way we want to go. At the same time, if we get the new Galaxy S III phones that they are offering, and switching to 4G, we will inevitably end up using more data.

Although they both take different roads to get there, at first blush Virgin and Telus seem to offer very similar plans, with the difference being how forgiving they are on overages. Virgin, Rogers and Telus all offer roaming data packages for when we travel to the US - something else that MTS can't seem to get their act together on.

One of our concerns is coverage. Rogers has very good coverage, Telus is decent (though they are making a big deal about all of the new towers they are building to expand their coverage here), and MTS is pretty good. Virgin is an unknown, though I could probably stop in one of their kiosks while we are out sometime and ask.

It's not that we have been particularly unhappy with MTS - like I said, they have decent coverage, and we will lose some of the bundle discount on our Internet and land line - but after toying with the Android early on, they have decided to hang their flag on the iPhone and Blackberry. Neither of those interest us for various reasons, though in fairness either would be a significant upgrade from venerable HTC phones we both have right now.