The (somewhat) good news for Canadian wireless customers: Rogers has caved and come up with a less horrid plan for the iPhone. You get 6GB for $30, but only if you sign up before Aug 31. And you still have to get a 3-year contract.

The bad news: Bell and Telus are using this opportunity, when all the ill will and reporting is aimed at Rogers, to announce that they’ll now be charging for incoming text messages, not just outgoing. From CTV:

Telus spokesperson Shawn Hall told CTV News the reason for the “moderate charge” is to “recover the cost of the investment we’re making in the network to handle the exponential growth in text messaging.”

Um, hang on. That doesn’t so much make with the, you know, sense. They’ve always charged $0.15 to send a message, right? And judging by their statement, the economics used to work. Let’s say that 5 years ago when there were (I’m making this up; the exact numbers don’t really matter) 1,000,000 text messages send, Bell made $150,000 and paid $150,000 for the infrastructure to support that (again, based on their earlier statement). Presumably that was a combination of the maintenance/operational cost and amortization on the hardware that they set up years before. So let’s say that there are now (again, making this up) 10,000,000 text messages sent; Bell would receive $1,500,000 and, unless texting hardware/software has gotten more expensive (and I’m really betting that it hasn’t), they would pay $1,500,000 to maintain it. Except that Bell will now earn $3,000,000 and pay $1,500,000, for a tidy profit (regardless of what the actual numbers are). Even if Bell has to upgrade their infrastructure to accommodate the additional volume, they can take the up-front hit and net out ahead as the equipment depreciates.

It would appear that Bell and Telus are dressing up a cash grab as a pity play. Oh, you customers love texting so much we’re just going to have to buy some new toys, but we’ll have to charge you extra. Rubbish. You’re a for-profit company, it’s well within your rights to look at the demand in the market and say, “Hey, people love texting so much that we could charge twice as much for it and volume wouldn’t go down by half, so it makes a ton of sense for our bottom line. Let’s do that.” Don’t pretend it’s to improve customer satisfaction. Look at how well that worked for banks with ATM “convenience fees”.

[UPDATE] While it’s unsurprising that the NDP would protest such a consumer-unfriendly fee, when you get the Conservative industry minister fighting you, you’ve probably gone too far.

[tags]rogers, telus, bell, canadian data rates, text messages[/tags]