It seems a pretty straightforward equation doesn’t it. If you want to encourage people to use the web on their mobile phones, then reduce the cost of data streaming, and more people will use it… Well no, it’s not quite that simple.
I’ve just returned from a month long holiday in Canada – one of the richest, most developed countries in the world, yet in terms of mobile data usage they are decades behind Europe. This is primarily because their infrastructure has not been de-regulated, and the largest provider (Rogers Telecom) has a stranglehold on 3G services. If I’d wanted to use mobile internet, the cost would have been a staggering 15p per kilobyte (yes kb, not mb!!). In other words, each email would have cost about £2, and uploading a pic to Facebook would have cost more than the flights out there. So you’re probably assuming that no-one accesses mobile data services, right? Er no – data usage over there is prolific! Are they all mad?
Well no, actually they’re quite cunning. You see Canadians know that having a mobile connection to the web is extortionate, so en mass, the whole nation has seemingly ditched that idea, and everyone offers free wifi instead! Thus neatly circumventing the virtual cellular monopoly, and allowing everyone to use each others routers. Brilliant. Anarchic and rebellious perhaps – but brilliant nonetheless.
So from Banff, up through the Rockies, then down through the interior, across to Vancouver Island, then onto the city itself, at every place we visited there were coffee shops, malls, hotels, even private houses with signs promoting “Free WIFI” I was never once stranded offline (much to my wife’s chagrin!)
But could it happen here? or is the fact that our data rates are considerably cheaper, actually removing the necessity for us to help one another? Perhaps we’ve all been scared by the UK thought police into what might happen to us if a ne’er-do-well were to use our connection to logon to one of Gary Glitters favourite sites? But the fact remains. Getting online in the Canadian outback (a place I still maintain is a cellularly repressed country!) Is easier and cheaper than in the UK.
We could learn a thing or two from those bear-chasing lumberjacks you know!
