Ask any Canadian who travels the world on business and he'll tell you he has issues with his wireless plan. Both in terms of technology and pricing, Canada has been lagging behind both Europe and the United States for years. But two recent developments offer some hope: It may now be possible to take your phone and laptop on the road and not run up phone bills that dwarf your mortgage payments. The introduction of a new roaming phone, and new Wi-Fi pricing from one of the country's biggest wireless carriers, suggest the arrival at last of affordable service for foreign trips.
Tuesday, Rogers announced new North American One Rate Data plans for data devices including its Rocket Stick, letting customers avoid roaming charges. The stick is a small wireless device that plugs into your laptop's USB port and picks up cell signals to make everywhere you go a hot spot. It has been expensive even in Canada, but until this month, it was even more costly on the road: With roaming charges, data in the U.S. cost $3 to $6 a megabyte. But now, Rogers has decided to lead Canadian wireless companies by eliminating roaming charges. With a one-year contract (the minimum Rogers offers), you get the stick for $49.99 and a flex plan for $45 a month that gives you up to 500 megabytes a month. If you use more, you automatically get bumped up to a $60 plan with one gigabyte a month. (The stick is free with a three-year commitment.)
But with free Wi-Fi proliferating throughout the Western world, does the convenience and performance warrant even the $60 charge? In Miami Beach this week, I first tried my usual hunt for free Wi-Fi. As is often the case, it took me a while to find the nearest Starbucks with a connection (some of the chain's locations have free Wi-Fi for customers with a rewards card). In a different part of town, I had to stop a couple of times to try to detect a signal, finding one after about half an hour at a French café that was just closing, at which I had to buy a palmier ($2.95) as rent for the table for the 10 minutes it took the staff to close the place around me.
Once I inserted the stick, though, everything changed. The obvious benefit of the stick is convenience: Anywhere you lay your laptop, that's your office. On a lovely mid-February day, I was able to sit by a fountain and check my e-mail.
But the action seemed a little sluggish, so I stopped in at another café, which has its own free Wi-Fi, to test the speeds. Using both speedtest.net and speakeasy.net, sites that test the upload and download speed of your connection, during the course of about 90 minutes, I learned the stick can be as much as four times slower for downloading than free Wi-Fi. If you're checking e-mail with no attachments, it won't make much difference. But anything heftier, and you may start to get antsy and cast about for the nearest Starbucks.
So is it worth it? It depends on the work you do. Speed versus convenience. Unfortunately, you still can't have it all. Though data transfer is an issue, for most of us, voice calls are the real killer. You can get packages from the big carriers that cut down on extortionate roaming fees, but you pay for the privilege. A small Vancouver company, Roam Mobility, is the first company in Canada that offers global SIM cards, which allow low roaming charges (20 to 40 cents a minute) and free incoming calls almost anywhere in the world.
