Rogers Dream fiasco and Canada reasonable carrier provisions

original post

I'm afraid even as a consumer advocate I don't find your arguments to Rogers very convincing.

As I said to you in our other conversation, in order to be successful, there has to be a very specific, reasonable request everyone will get behind.

Otherwise, people cannot be bothered, as typified in http://groups.google.com/group/android-users-in-canada/browse_thread/..., their expectations from corporations are very low, or it "works for them" (after substantial inconvenience, see Y's response). This defeats any ability to make noise to get attention, to organize behind reasonable demands that most consumers will agree to.

If I were to write a reasonable charter for mobile providers, it would look like this:

1. The consumer is paying for a certain amount of bandwidth and voice usage per month, they can use it however they want with whatever devices they want, as long as they are not disrupting the network.

2. If the carrier is offering extended contracts, the user should have reasonably priced options if their device is lost, stolen or damaged, or it proves inappropriate for any reason. An upfront charge with replacement devices at a pro-rated replacement cost is reasonable.

3. Everyone's dealings with the company should be the same, based on clear rules, we should not be hearing about exceptional offers to individuals when we are treated in a substandard way, after being exasperated by inconsistent and apathetic service.

There has clearly been some trickery on Rogers' part. We are all here primarily because we respond to ideas of an alternative, Linux/open source based operating system which we can understand, participate in the community in a meaningful way, build apps for and work with the low level operating system. Rogers did claim the Android would be an "open," "revolution" phone. They created a campaign around these ideas and specifically the Android devices. to entrap persons such as ourselves who would respond to these ideas. When they realized the Dream they had sold would not be upgradeable, they made an offer to upgrade Dream users to the Magic, specifically stating this was the reason. There was no mention of the 911 problem, and it's noteworthy that the 911 problem was fixed months before in community provided distributions of Android. The upgrade offer was cancelled prematurely, and after a period of time we were told the upgrade was due to the 911 problem, and now that it had been fixed the upgrade would no longer be available. Android users who didn't want to lose data and eventually voice access were forced to "upgrade" their devices to a distribution that doesn't support community upgrading.

Clearly, there are mistakes and dishonesty on Rogers' part here. Putting forward a personal grab bag of complaints may get you out of your contract, but you'll be right back where you started in two months. Having a clear, organized statement of requests is likely to be more effective.

Mobile devices are the future of the Internet, just like the "real" Internet it needs to be more than a channel to keep corporations alive and feed us commercials. Rogers is already making very good profits, they should be more than happy with charging $1200 a year to provide basic service and let us run whatever device we want.

Some people will say they can already run any third party device on the Rogers network, but they're operating in a grey zone, until this is clarified we can be forced to buy a Rogers provided device whether we want it or not, and issues such as billing, access and support will always be in question.

Clarifying that we can run any device on the Rogers network will result in a a clear, open market for devices, leading to greater consumer confidence and participation, more choice with easier to upgrade devices, and better prices - like computers using "regular" Internet.