Our United States-based readers on unlimited data plans for $30/month won't think much of this blog post, but for us BlackBerry users on Rogers in Canada this is huge news. Rumor has it Rogers is going to unleash a new tiered BlackBerry data plan come March 18th. This is what we've been hoping for - a month ago Rogers announced Flex Data Plans for PC cards and my fingers have been crossed since then for them to follow up with some BlackBerry data plan revamping.
The new BlackBerry data plans will work on a tiered program. Your billing begins with the basic Tier 1, $15/month for 10MB of data plan and you get bumped up from there based on your usage. Existing plans will be grandfathered into the plan. The new plan should come in as follows but hey, this isn't "official" news yet, so things could change before we see this launched:
- $15 - 10MB BIS/BES @ Tier 1
- $30 - 10MB to 50MB BIS/BES @ Tier 2
- $50 - 50MB to 200MB BIS/BES @ Tier 3
- $65 - 200MB to 500MB BIS/BES @ Tier 4
How big is this news to Rogers users? Let me illustrate using myself as an example. During the month of the Smartphone Round Robin (where I used a Treo, iPhone and Tilt for a week each), I left my $60/mo for 25MB of data BIS plan intact. I didn't even think about going over on data. Come the end of the month, my bill from Rogers was $700 more than my plan. Why? Because my week of iPhone use sucked up nearly 100 megs of data and I went over my plan for the month by ~90MB, which Rogers charged me for at a whopping $7/meg on the bill (I did call in and point out the Overage Protection I was entitled too, which was not automatically adjusted on that bill for some reason, and did get the bill knocked down substantially). The real kicker here is that had I been using my brain, I would have switched to Roger's $100/month for 200MB data plan before the Round Robin began, but I didn't, so my lack of foresight cost me. But had this new Flex BlackBerry data plan been in effect, my data bill for that month would have automatically come in at $65... a savings of over $600 had I been sucker enough just to pay the bill outright without calling in to go over my statement. And prior to the Overage Protection plan (which came into effect not that long ago) I would have been totally S.O.L.
[ BlackBerry Sync via HF ]
