Canadian customers that use Rogers are getting yet another price increase – this time to the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) group – with $10 added to your monthly bill…what was once $40 per month is now $50. It seems like 2014 is the year of price increases for Canadians and there is no escaping the increases as all of the major carriers have increased prices at least two times already and we are barely out of the month of April. So far, neither Bell or TELUS have updated their pricing, but it is probably only a matter of time – once one takes the first step, especially the largest of the carriers, Rogers does it, the others are soon to follow…yet the Industry Minister James Moore sees nothing wrong with the apparent ‘price fixing’ that seems to go in Canada that he claims he is trying to increase competition.
All three carriers, Rogers, Bell and TELUS, started out giving an incentive to customers that brought their own device to their network by offering a $20 a month discount on services. It worked out to be $480 over a two-year contract, or about the same amount of a subsidized smartphone, but with this price increase, Rogers is effectively cutting the savings of BYOD to only $240 cost savings over a two-year period. With this pricing structure, the subscriber will not recover the cost of a phone purchased outright, and basically discourages users from bringing their own device.
Rogers is clearly pushing their plans that share everything and issued this statement: “The Share Everything Plans overall offer more value, including unlimited nationwide calling, different data bucket sizes, the ability to share data between family members and devices at reduced rates, and the option to upgrade devices every 2 years. We also added the two new data buckets, 2G and 4G to provide more options for our customers. BYOD still offers considerable saving for families who want to bring their own device and share these features.”
Let us hope that Rogers is done with their price increases for the year. You would think that with three major carriers in Canada that there could be some real competition amongst them, but the way that the carriers have divided up their services, is there any real competition or incentive to bring prices down – from the looks of things, that would be a big, fat, NO! Please let us know how you feel on our Google+ Page about the pricing in Canada and if your were a BYOD subscriber…as always, we would love to hear from you.